The Holocaust
The Jewish Tragedy
Martin GILBERT
Fontana, 1987
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Martin GILBERT (1987): The Holocaust. The Jewish Tragedy, Fontana
There are some things that must never be forgotten. This text, one of the crucial
documents of the twentieth century, provides a chronicle of the shameful and
inhuman acts perpetrated by the Third Reich and its collaborators during World
War II.
In this detailed and harrowing historical study, Martin Gilbert traces the rise of
anti-Semitism in Germany from the early fulminations of Martin Luther to the
venomous rhetoric of Adolf Hitler. He faithfully details the experiences of those
who suffered the horrors unleashed by the murderous forces of Adolph Hitler
and his inner circle in a way that ensures future generations will remember a
part of recent human history that most would rather forget.
Hitler’s first assault upon Europe began in March 1938 when the German army
occupied Austria. The 200,000 Jews of Austria immediately forfeited their
freedom.
After Kristallnacht, the night when Jewish synagogues and business houses
were destroyed by Nazis in November 1938, Hitler further tightened the noose
around the Jews of Germany by demanding a collective fine of one billion marks
as “punishment” for the damage done, despite the fact that the damage was
caused by his own troops and supporters. Twenty percent of the property of
every German Jew was confiscated. And all German Jewish children were
summarily banned from attending German schools.
Within nine months of Kristallnacht, Hitler signed a non-aggression pact with
Joseph Stalin. This cynical act ensured that the Soviet Union would not interfere
with Hitler’s plans to invade Poland. On 3rd September 1939, the third day of the
German occupation of Poland, 21 Jews were brutally executed in the marketplace of Wieruszow, a small border town. Two days later, the SS torched the
Jewish sector of the town, indiscriminately cutting down those who fled the
flames. This was the first demonstration to the three million Jews of Poland that
Hitler meant business. Within two months, over 5,000 Polish Jews had been
murdered.
Norway and Denmark were invaded in April 1940. A month later, the German
army entered Belgium, Holland and France. By then, the construction of the first
concentration camp outside Germany at Osweicim, or Auschwitz had been
completed.
In October of 1940, the 400,000 Jews of Warsaw - a third of the city’s
population - were herded into a tiny area. In the following months, tens of
thousands of Jews from surrounding towns and villages were forcibly removed
from their homes and transported to the newly created ghetto. Conditions were
appalling. An inmate later recalled: “We ourselves lived 12 or 15 people to a
room.” Within three months, thousands of Jews within the ghetto were dying of
starvation.
The systematic killing of Jews in large numbers began at the time of the
German invasion of the Soviet Union in June 1941. The “operation” was
orchestrated by the specially trained Einsatzgruppen and their collaborators.
The brutality of these troops defies description. Entire Jewish communities were
wiped out by Nazi soldiers and sympathetic locals in Eastern Poland, Latvia,
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Lithuania, Estonia and the Ukraine. More Jews were murdered in the first five
weeks of the invasion of Russia than had been killed in the previous eight years
of Nazi rule. Over the following two months, entire communities of Jews were
herded into rail “transports” and taken to the newly constructed concentration
camps in Poland and eastern Germany.
By November 1941, the outside world could no longer ignore the immensity and
the savagery of the slaughter being carried out by the Nazis and their
collaborators. On November 14th 1941, Winston Churchill wrote: “None has
suffered more cruelly than the Jew the unspeakable evils wrought by Hitler and
his vile regime.”
The inhabitants of the Warsaw Ghetto were further smitten by a supremely
harsh winter. Large numbers of men, women and children were dying because
of exposure and starvation.
That same winter, the first “trials” of Zyklon B were carried out on 600 Soviet
prisoners of war and 300 Jews at Auschwitz. The “success” of this operation
was applauded by Hitler’s inner circle. It heralded the implementation of one of
the most heinous collective actions in human history, the so-called “final
solution.” Although mass murders had been committed earlier, and tens of
thousands of Jews and Gypsies had been gassed at Chelmno in 1941, the cold
terror formalised under the supervision of Reinhard Heydrich at the Wannsee
Conference in January 1942 set into motion a machinery of killing that had
never before been seen upon the earth. It took another five months for the
British forces to mobilize and begin the first aerial assaults upon Germany. But
by that time, hundreds of thousands of Jews had already been gassed and
burned.
By August 1942, the genocidal machinery was fully operational. During that
month alone, over 400,000 Jews were murdered, mainly by gassing, in
German-occupied Europe. By the end of 1942, most of Poland’s pre-war Jewish
communities had been gassed and burned in the concentration camps at
Chelmno, Belzec and Sobibor. In the early months of 1944, the process had
reached such a pitch that in the Birkenau camp alone, 12,000 Jews were
gassed every 24 hours.
Martin Gilbert’s account also details the readiness with which police forces,
militias and individuals in Poland, Czechoslovakia, Lithuania and elsewhere
enthusiastically took on the grisly work of the Nazi SS against innocent men,
women and children in their Jewish communities. These shocking betrayals
reflect the tenuousness of the civility and the thinness of the veneer of sociality
that separates so-called normal relations and acts of bestial cruelty towards
individuals and groups.
The Allied Forces landed in Normandy in June 1944 at much the same time that
the Red Army had massed on the Eastern front in preparation for its movement
into Germany. The Soviet forces entered Majdanek in July 1944. There, they
encountered a reality too shocking to have ever been anticipated. The Germans
had departed hastily. The crematoria were still warm and the charred bones and
putrefying remains of thousands of bodies were scattered everywhere.
It took a further ten months for the Nazis to be finally vanquished. Yet even after
the Red Army had “liberated” Poland, Adolf Eichmann proudly boasted of the
continuing extermination of Jews in Hungary. The murders continued until the
very end.
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Martin Gilbert’s chronicle of the wretched fate of the Jews of Europe during
Hitler’s reign is painful and harrowing reading. It sears our collective memories
with an indelible record of the contradictions embodied in a nation that has
birthed both high philosophies and bestial technologies. And it shows that the
charade of civility in which humanity takes pride is only wafer thin, barely
containing the ferocious animality that even today lies latent within the cones of
the short-range and long-range missiles that prop up and support the cynical
military operations of powerful nations.
VDS, August 2006
Revised April 2010
Martin GILBERT (1987): The Holocaust. The Jewish Tragedy, Fontana,
Glasgow
First steps to iniquity
In 1543, Martin Luther set out his “honest advice” as to how
Jews should be treated. “First,” he wrote, “their synagogues
should be set on fire, and whatever does not burn up should be
covered or spread over with dirt so that no one may ever be
able to see a cinder or stone of it.” Jewish homes, he urged,
should likewise be “broken down or destroyed.” Jews should
then be “put under one roof, or in a stable, like Gypsies, in
order that they may realize that they are not masters in our
land.” They should be put to work, to earn their living “by
sweat of their noses,” or, if regarded even then as too dangerous, these “poisonous
bitter worms” should be stripped of their belongings “which they have extorted
usuriously from us” and driven out of the country “for all time.”
Luther's advice was typical of the anti-Jewish venom of his time.
p 19
In the turmoil of defeat [after World War I], voices were raised blaming ‘the Jews’ for
Germany’s humiliation. In Berlin, the nation’s capital, there were clashes between
Jews and anti-Semites: “Indications of growing anti-Semitism,” the Berlin
correspondent of The Times reported on 14 August 1919, “are becoming frequent.”
A manifestation of this anti-Semitism was shown by one of Germany’s new and tiny
political parties, the National Socialist German Workers’ Party, the NSDAP, soon
better known as the ‘Nazi’ Party, after the first two syllables of ‘National’ - Nazional.
The party’s twenty-five-point programme was published in Munich on 25 February
1920, at a time when it had only sixty members. The essence of its programme was
nationalistic, the creation of a “Great Germany,” and the return of Germany’s
colonies, which had been lost at the time of Germany’s defeat.
p 23
The anti-Jewish sections of the Nazi Party's programme had been drafted by three
members. One of them, Adolf Hitler, was number seven in the party’s hierarchy. A
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former soldier on the western front, he had been wounded and gassed in October
1918, less than a month before the war’s end. On 13 August 1920, Hitler spoke for
two hours in a Munich beer cellar on the theme, “Why we are against the Jews.”
During his speech, he promised his listeners that his party, and his party alone, “will
free you from the power of the Jew!” There must, he said, be a new slogan, and one
not only for Germany – “Anti-Semites of the World, Unite! People of Europe, Free
Yourselves!” - and he demanded what he called a “thorough solution,” in brief, “the
removal of the Jews from the midst of our people.”
p 24
The party symbol became the HakenkreuzI, or swastika, an ancient Sanskrit term and
symbol for fertility, used in India interchangeably with the Star of David, or Magen
David, whose double triangle had long signified for the Jewish people a protective
shield, and had become since 1897 a symbol of Jewish national aspirations. p 24
On 9 November 1923 Hitler tried, and failed, to seize power in Munich. Briefly, he
had managed to proclaim a ‘National Republic.’ He was arrested, tried for high
treason, and on 1 April 1924 sentenced to five years in detention.
After less than eight months in prison, Hitler was released on parole. During those
eight months he had begun a lengthy account of his life and thought. Entitled Mein
Kampf, My Struggle, the first volume was published on 18 July 1925. In it, the full
fury of Hitler’s anti-Jewish hatred was made clear.
p 25
On 10 December 1926 Hitler published the second volume of Mein Kampf. Once
again, anti-Jewish venom permeated its pages. “At the beginning of the war,” Hitler
wrote, “or even during the war, if twelve or fifteen thousand of these Jews who were
corrupting the nation had been forced to submit to poison gas, just as hundreds of
thousands of our best German workers from every social stratum and from every trade
and calling had to face it in the field, then the millions of sacrifices made at the front
would not have been in vain.” On the contrary, Hitler continued, “if twelve thousand
of these malefactors had been eliminated in proper time, probably the lives of a
million decent men, who would be of value to Germany in the future, would have
been saved.”
These were still the writings of an extremist with
no prospect of political influence, let alone
power. In 1926 his party’s membership stood at
seventeen thousand, among them the blackuniformed Schutzstaffeln, ‘Protection Squad,’ or
SS, set up a year earlier to provide Hitler and the
Nazi leadership with personal protection: a
personal security service. It was all on a small, if
noisy, scale.
pp 28-29
In Berlin on 1 January 1930, brown-uniformed Stormtroopers killed eight Jews: the
first Jewish victims of the Nazi era. For the next nine months, Jews were molested in
cafes and theatres, and synagogue services were constantly interrupted by these
uniformed hooligans, already dignified by the title ‘Party Members.’
pp 29-30
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In the election for President in June 1932, which the incumbent President, Field
Marshal Hindenburg, won with 53 per cent of the ballot, the former corporal, Adolf
Hitler, came second, winning over 36 per cent of the votes cast. . . .
In further national elections on 31 July 1932, the Nazi Party won 230 seats in the
Reichstag. Hitler had now established enough power to form a government in
coalition with others. But he declined to accept second place, refusing to agree to a
coalition unless he were Chancellor.
pp 30-31
A prolonged political crisis led to negotiations, and negotiations led to a compromise.
The parties of the centre and the right agreed to accept Hitler as Chancellor, at the
head of the coalition in which they would share Cabinet seats and power. Hitler
agreed, and on 30 January 1933 was appointed Chancellor. He was forty-three years
old.
“I had been skating that day,” a ten-year-old Jewish boy, Leslie Frankel, who lived in
the village of Biblis, near Worms, later recalled. “When I got home,” Frankel added,
“we heard that Hitler had become Chancellor. Everybody shook. As kids of ten we
shook.”
p 31
1933: The Shadow of the Swastika
Hitler moved rapidly to establish his
dictatorship. An Emergency Decree,
passed by the Reichstag on 5 February
1933, expropriated all Communist Party
buildings and printing presses, and
closed down all pacifist organizations. In
the following week, the Stormtroops,
now buoyed up by the enthusiasm of the
constitutional victory, attacked trade
union buildings, and beat up political
opponents in the street.
p 32
In October 1933, a new disciplinary and punishment code was introduced at Dachau,
intended to make the camp a “Model Concentration Camp,” in which absolute
compliance with orders would be assured by the strictest of penalties. “Agitators,” the
new regulations stated, “are to be hanged by virtue of the Law of the Revolution.”
p 40
As 1933 came to an end, the half million Jews of Germany could look back over a
year in which thirty-six Jews had been murdered, six killed in the course of “mob
outrages,” and three others killed “while trying to escape.” It had also been a year of
mass emigration. The Nazi aim was to eliminate Jewish influence from every facet of
German life. They had no objection to emigration. In 1933, 5,392 German Jews
sought entry, and were admitted, to Palestine. A further thirty thousand German Jews
left for elsewhere in Western Europe, for Britain, and for the United States.
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In the last week of October 1933, in reaction to the growth in Jewish immigrants to
Palestine, Arab rioters attacked public buildings in Nablus, Jaffa and Jerusalem. The
British drove back the rioters, leaving twenty-six Arabs dead. Nazi propaganda
broadcasts, beamed to Palestine, Syria and Egypt, helped to ensure Arab hostility
towards the Jewish immigrants would be kept as high as possible. In its turn, this
Arab hostility ensured that the British Mandate authorities would be forced to look
again, in due course, at their immigration laws, and to restrict Jewish entry into the
Jewish National Home proclaimed in 1917 at the very moment when such entry had
become a matter of urgent need.
p 41
Towards Disinheritance
Success for the continuing Nazi broadcasts to the Arab world, through Radio-Berlin
and Radio-Stuttgart, came on August 3, with the beginning of three days of antiJewish riots in the Algerian city of Constantine. In three days, twenty-three Jews were
killed, and thirty-eight wounded. But Arab unrest could not staunch the flow of
German refugees, either to Palestine or elsewhere. In 1934 a total of 6,941 German
Jews were admitted to Palestine.
p 44
Of the seventy-five thousand Jewish refugees of 1933, 1934 and 1935, the largest
single group, thirty thousand in all, had gone to Palestine. Nine thousand had gone to
the United States. Several thousand had gone to Britain, others to South Africa,
Canada and Australia. Many thousands more had found a haven in France, Holland
and Belgium, in Austria, and in Czechoslovakia.
Inside Germany, at least a quarter of the Jews who remained had been deprived of
their professional livelihood by boycott, decree, or local pressure. More than ten
thousand public health and social workers had been driven out of their posts, four
thousand lawyers were without the right to practise, two thousand doctors had been
expelled from hospitals and clinics, two thousand actors, singers and musicians had
been driven from their orchestras, clubs and cafes. A further twelve thousand editors
and journalists had been dismissed, as had eight hundred university professors and
lecturers, and eight hundred elementary and secondary school-teachers. p 47
Comprehensive new laws were announced which elevated random discrimination into
a system: the Nuremberg Laws of 15 September 1935.
Two laws, both signed by Hitler personally, defined “Reich Citizenship” and set out
the rules for “the Protection of German Blood and German Honour.” Under the first
law, Citizenship could only belong to “a national of German or kindred blood.” Under
the second law, all Jews were defined as being not of German blood. Marriages
between Jews and German ‘nationals’ were forbidden; all marriages conducted “in
defiance of this law” were invalid. Sexual relations outside marriage were forbidden
between Jews and Germans. Jews were forbidden to fly the German flag. pp 47-48
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After the Nuremberg Laws
Tens of thousands of Polish Jews sought safety in emigration. By the end of 1936, a
record annual influx of Polish Jews - 11,596 men, women and children - had been
admitted to Palestine. But even at the rate at which Britain was granting Palestine
certificates, such emigration could never be anything but a minor amelioration for
three million Polish Jews; and Arab hostility inside Palestine to Jewish immigration
was already leading to violent Arab protests and to the decision by the British
authorities to seek a drastic reduction in the number of future certificates. p 52
Throughout 1937 the German government increased its military and air strength. “We
seem to be moving,” Winston Churchill told the House of Commons on April 14,
“drifting steadily, against our will, against the will of every race and every people and
every class, towards some hideous catastrophe.”
p 54
The desperate search for safety continued: in 1937 a further 3,601 German Jews
reached Palestine, as did 3,636 Jews from Poland. But these figures, so much lower
than those for 1936, reflected new restrictions imposed by the British Mandate
authorities as the Arab revolt against Jewish immigration continued. For the Jews of
Germany, this was an ominous development, reflected in Palestine itself by the
deaths, between April 1936 and the end of 1937, of 113 Jews, and by the first Arab
deaths, fifteen in all, in Jewish reprisal raids, despite the condemnation of such
reprisals by the Jewish National Council in Palestine.
p 55
‘Hunted Like Rats’
On 30 January 1938, Hitler celebrated the fifth anniversary of his coming to power.
For five years he had rearmed Germany, and given repeated notice to the world that
he considered himself responsible for German-speaking people wherever they lived,
whether in his birthplace, Austria, in the Sudeten mountain borderlands of
Czechoslovakia, in the Free City of Danzig, or even in the western provinces of
Poland. As yet his growing armies had crossed no frontier.
p 57
On March 12 the German army entered Vienna. Independent Austria was no more:
absorbed into a new entity, Greater Germany. The 183,000 Jews of Austria, most of
them living in the capital, suddenly became a part of the Nazi hegemony. . . .
Overnight, the Jews of Vienna, one sixth of the city’s population, were deprived of all
civil rights: the right to own property, large or small, the right to be employed or to
give employment, the right to exercise their profession, any profession, the right to
enter restaurants or cafes, public baths or public parks. Instead they experienced
physical assault: the looting of shops, the breaking of heads, the tormenting of
passers-by.
pp 58-59
Emigration still offered a way out for those Jews of Germany and Austria who were at
liberty. More than ninety-eight thousand Jews, nearly half of the Jews of Austria, left
for other lands. They were, indeed, encouraged to do so by the Nazis, and a special
emigration office, the Central Office for Jewish Emigration, was set up in Vienna for
them, headed by a thirty-two-year-old SS officer, Adolf Eichmann. At the same time,
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twelve thousand Jewish families were evicted from their homes, almost eight
thousand Jewish businesses were ‘Aryanized,’ and more than thirty thousand Jews
were thrown out of their jobs.
On 6 July 1938 an international conference opened at Evian, a French resort town on
the shores of Lake Geneva, with the purpose of discussing the future reception of
refugees. More than 150,000 Jews had already been taken in from the torments of
Germany, and now of Austria. Of these 8,000 had been admitted to Britain, 40,000 to
Palestine, 55,000 into the United States, 8,000 into Brazil, 15,000 into France, 2,000
into Belgium, at least 14,000 into Switzerland, several thousand into Bolivia, 1,000
into Sweden, 845 into Denmark and 150 into Norway.
Not all the delegates at Evian were sympathetic to the Jewish plight. “It will no doubt
be appreciated,” the Australian delegate, T.W. White, told the conference, “that as we
have no racial problem, we are not desirous of importing one.”
p 64
‘The Seeds of a Terrible Vengeance’
Zindel Grynszpan decided to send a postcard to his son Hirsch, in Paris, describing his
family’s travails. The young man, enraged by what he read, went to the German
Embassy in Paris, and, on 6 November 1938, shot the first German official who
received him, Ernst vom Rath.
As vom Rath lay wounded, Hitler and the Nazis denounced the deed as part of a
Jewish-inspired world conspiracy against Germany. On November 8 Wilfrid Israel
called at the British Embassy in Berlin to repudiate Grynszpan’s act, and to warn of
imminent reprisals. By the following day, November 9, vom Rath was dead. From the
moment that news of his death reached Hitler in Munich, an unprecedented wave of
violence broke over Germany’s remaining three hundred thousand Jews. . . .
In twenty-four hours of street violence, ninety-one Jews were killed. More than thirty
thousand - one in ten of those who remained - were arrested and sent to concentration
camps. Before most of them were released two to three months later, as many as a
thousand had been murdered, 244 of them in Buchenwald.
pp 68-69
It was not by the killing, however, nor by the arrests or the suicides, that the night of
November 9 was to be remembered. During the night, as well as breaking into tens of
thousands of shops and homes, the Stormtroops set fire to one hundred and ninety-one
synagogues; or, if it was thought that fire might endanger nearby buildings, smashed
the synagogues as thoroughly as possible with hammers and axes.
The destruction of the synagogues led the Nazis to call that night the Kristallnacht, or
“night of broken glass”: words chosen deliberately to mock and belittle. From
Leipzig, the United States Consul, David H. Buffum, reported that the three main
synagogues, set on fire simultaneously, “were irreparably gutted by flames.” At the
Jewish cemetery in Leipzig the Nazis practised “tactics which approached the
ghoulish,” uprooting tombstones and violating graves.
pp 68-70
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In the aftermath of the Kristallnacht, German Jewry was ‘fined’ for the damage done.
The fine, a thousand million marks, was levied by the compulsory confiscation of
twenty per cent of the property of every German Jew. This confiscation was
promulgated by government decree on 12 November 1938. Three days later,
following five days of being pilloried and discriminated against in the classroom,
German Jewish children were finally barred from German schools.
p 73
The “opportunity offered by Grynszpan’s criminal act,” Sir George Ogilvie-Forbes
wrote to London from Berlin on that same day, November 16, “has let loose forces of
medieval barbarism.” The position of the German Jews was, he commented, “indeed
tragic,” and he added: “They dwell in the grip and at the mercy of a brutal oligarchy,
which fiercely resents all humanitarian foreign intervention. Misery and despair are
already there and when their resources are either denied to them or exhausted, their
end will be starvation.”
p 73
Speaking in Berlin on 30 January 1939, Hitler declared that in the event of war: “The
result will not be the bolshevization of the earth, and thus the victory of Jewry, but the
annihilation of the Jewish race in Europe.”
p 76
As Nazi rule was imposed on Bohemia and Moravia, the Hungarian government took
a further step towards isolating its own five hundred thousand Jews, and those tens of
thousands of Jews brought within its borders by the annexation of southern Slovakia
and Ruthenia, both formerly parts of post-1918 Czechoslovakia.
p 79
On 23 August 1939 the world learned of the signature of a non-aggression pact
between Nazi Germany and the Soviet Union. Suddenly it became clear that if Hitler
were to invade Poland, the Soviet Union would stand aside. This pact was ominous
news for the 3,250,000 Jews of Poland.
p 82
On the evening of August 31, as German radio poured out a stream of venom against
the Polish republic, sixty German Jewish children were traveling with their adult
escort in a train crowded with German soldiers from Cologne to Cleve, the only point
on the Dutch frontier to which trains were still running. Crossing the frontier, the train
proceeded to the Hook of Holland. Overnight, the children crossed the North Sea to
the British port of Harwich. There, at dawn on September 1, they learned that
Germany had invaded Poland.
p 83
September 1939: the Trapping of Polish Jewry
On Sunday, 3 September 1939, Britain and France declared war on Germany. They
could do nothing to halt, or even slow down, the pace of the German advance across
Poland. As the German forces advanced, and within hours of their occupation of a
town or village, Jews were singled out for abuse and massacre by special SS
‘operational groups,’ acting in the rear of the German fighting forces. That same
Sunday, September 3, a few hours after German troops had entered the frontier town
of Wieruszow, one of these SS troops seized twenty Jews, among them several
prominent citizens, took them to the market place, and lined them up for execution.
Among these Jews was Israel Lewi, a man of sixty-four. When his daughter Leibe
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Lewi, ran up to her father to say farewell, a German ordered her to open her mouth for
her “impudence,” and then fired a bullet into it. Liebe Lewi fell dead on the spot. The
twenty men were then executed.
p 85
Entering Piotrkow itself on September 5, the Germans tried to set fire to the
predominantly Jewish section of the city, shooting dead those Jews who ran from the
burning buildings. After the fires had died down, German soldiers entered a house
which had escaped the flames, took out six Jews, and ordered them to run. As the
Jews ran, they were shot. Five died violently; the sixth, Reb Bunem Lebel, died later
of his wounds.
In the first ten days of the German advance, such onslaughts against unarmed,
defenceless civilians were carried out in more than a hundred towns and villages.
pp 86-87
In the first fifty-five days of the German conquest and occupation of western and
central Poland five thousand Jews were murdered behind the lines: dragged from their
homes, and from their hiding places. “On the first day,” Eda Lichtmann has recalled,
of the occupation of Pilica, “the Germans took people, especially men, to work, and
forced them to clean and collect dust with their hands: Jewish men. They were
ordered to undress, and behind each Jewish man there was a German soldier with a
fixed bayonet who ordered him to run. If the Jew stopped, he would be hit in the back
with a bayonet. Almost all the Jewish men returned home bleeding and amongst them
- my father.” Then, a few days later, on September 12, “large trucks appeared all of a
sudden,” soldiers jumped off the trucks, then went from house to house, seizing men,
irrespective of their age.
Thirty-two Jews were seized that day in Pilica, as well as four Poles. First they were
photographed, and their names recorded. Then they were marched into the market
place and forced to call out, in German: “We are traitors of the people.” Then they
were taken away in trucks. Eda Lichtmann ran after the trucks, with a friend whose
father had also been seized. “We ran after them until a small forest. All the Jews were
already dead on the ground. My father as well, shot in many parts of his body.” Jews
and Poles: all were dead. “I kissed my father; he was as cold as ice.”
pp 87-88
Even while these outbursts of confiscation and killing were taking place throughout
western Poland, a conference was held in Berlin on September 21 at which the longterm future of Polish Jewry was discussed. The host of the conference was Reinhard
Heydrich, Chief of the Reich Central Security Office. . . .
Heydrich told the conference that, as a prerequisite of the
“ultimate aim,” Polish Jews were to be concentrated in the
larger cities. If possible, large areas of western Poland “should
be cleared completely of Jews,” or should at least have in them
“as few concentration centres as possible.” Elsewhere in
Poland, Jews should be concentrated only in cities situated at
railway junctions, or along a railway, “so that future measures
may be accomplished more easily.” . . . .
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This “concentration of Jews in cities” meant the creation of ghettos, such as had not
existed in Europe since the Middle Ages. To facilitate this “concentration,” Heydrich
noted, orders would probably have to be given “forbidding Jews to enter certain
districts of that city altogether.” At the same time, farmland belonging to Jews should
be taken away from them: “entrusted to the care” of neighbouring German “or even
Polish” peasants.
pp 88-89
From the first week of the invasion of Poland, the Germans had established a
euthanasia programme for ‘mental defectives’: not only Poles and Jews, but also
Germans. The site to which mental patients were sent, and then killed, was in a forest
near the village of Piasnica, not far from Danzig. Here, from the middle of October
1939 until the end of the year, several thousand ‘defectives’ were killed: twelve
hundred of them being Germans who were sent there from psychiatric institutions
inside Germany. Kurt Eimann, the SS officer in charge of the executions, was later
accused - at Hanover in 1968 - of having personally shot the first victim in the back of
the head, as an example for the rest of his men.
p 95
In Lodz, where 233,000 Jews made up a third of the city’s population, daily incidents
characterized the fate of Polish Jewry. Mary Berg, who had gone from Warsaw to
Lodz, and had begun to keep a diary, recorded how, on November 2, she looked out
of her window:
A man with markedly Semitic features was standing quietly on the sidewalk near the curb.
A uniformed German approached him and apparently gave him an unreasonable order, for I
could see that the poor fellow tried to explain something with an embarrassed expression.
Then a few other uniformed Germans came upon the scene and began to beat their victim
with rubber truncheons. They called a cab and tried to push him into it, but he resisted
vigorously. The Germans then tied his legs together with a rope, attached the end of the
rope to the cab from behind, and ordered the driver to start. The unfortunate man's face
struck the sharp stones of the pavement, dyeing them red with blood. Then the cab
vanished down the street.
The Germans who carried out such atrocities had been exposed for more than six
years to the full venom of anti-Jewish propaganda: at school, in the newspapers, in
their place of work, in the streets, and in their military indoctrination. “Behind all the
enemies of Germany’s ascendancy,” a Berlin anti-Communist magazine declared on
November 2, “stand those who demand our encirclement - the oldest enemies of the
German people and of all healthy, rising nations - the Jews.”
pp 98-97
‘Blood of Innocents’
On 13 November 1939, a twenty-year-old former convict, Pinkus Zylberryng, a Jew,
had shot and killed a Polish policeman at 9 Nalewki Street, in the centre of Warsaw’s
Jewish district. Although Zylberrying was identified, the Germans arrested all fiftythree male inhabitants of no. 9. On November 22, all fifty-three were executed. But
before announcing the execution, the Germans demanded 300,000 zlotys from the
Jewish Council. “The levy was to be a ransom for the lives of the men under arrest,” a
member of the Council, Ludwik Landau, noted, “but when the representatives of the
Council arrived, the money was taken from them, but they were told that the prisoners
had already been shot.”
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Among those shot in this reprisal action was one of Warsaw’s leading gynaecologists,
the forty-five-year-old Samuel Zamkowy. “This was the first mass arrest and
murder,” David Wdowinski later recalled, “and it threw the Jewish population into
panic.”
p 102
In Warsaw, a book had been published in Yiddish that year, describing some of the
worst moments in Jewish history: the Crusader massacre of Jews in the twelfth
century, the Chmielnicki killings in the Ukraine in the seventeenth century, and the
Ukrainian pogroms of 1918 and 1919. “But it did not occur to us,” Yitzhak
Zuckerman, then a young Zionist in Warsaw, later wrote, “that the poison cup was not
yet empty, and that we should have to drain it to its last dregs.”
p 108
1940: ‘A wave of evil’
On February 8 the Germans had
ordered the setting up of a ghetto
in Lodz, and chose as the site of
the ghetto two of the most
neglected districts of the city. Of
a total of 31,721 apartments in
this ghetto area, most of them
with a single room, only 725 had
running water. The use of
electricity in the ghetto was
forbidden between eight in the
evening and six in the morning.
More than 160,000 Jews were moved inside the ghetto, which was ‘closed’ on May 1,
from which day the German police were ordered to shoot without warning any Jew
who might approach the barbed-wire fence which now surrounded it.
p 116
While Nazi terror in Poland tightened its grip, Britain and France, at war with
Germany since September 1939, had made no military move against Hitler’s Reich.
These were the months of the Phoney War. In Warsaw Chaim Kaplan noted in his
diary on 7 March 1940, “Those who understand the military and political situation
well are going about like mourners. There is no ground for hope that the decisive
action will come this spring, and lack of a decision means that our terrible distress
will last a long time.”
p 118
War in the West: Terror in the East
In April 1940, German forces occupied Norway, forestalling a British move, and
defeating the British, French and Polish exile forces sent against them at Narvik.
“Misery over the defeat in Norway,” Ringelblum noted. “Our spirits have fallen.” In
Norway, seventeen hundred Jews, of whom three hundred were refugees from
Germany, came under German rule. In Denmark, which German forces occupied as
part of their Norwegian campaign, seven thousand four hundred more Jews were now
within the Nazi orbit, fourteen hundred of them refugees from Germany, Austria and
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Czechoslovakia. But neither the Norwegian nor the Danish Jews were molested, at the
insistence of the Danish and Norwegian authorities, who retained certain minimal
powers of internal administration.
p 119
On May 10, German forces struck at Belgium, Holland and France. The speed and
scale of the German advance, accompanied by air bombardment, soon overwhelmed
the Belgian and Dutch forces. In north-eastern France, a large British army, trapped at
Dunkirk, was forced to evacuate, leaving much of its equipment behind. The Germans
then turned towards Paris.
p 119
As the German armies drove through Holland on May 15, a further 140,000 Jews,
among them several thousand refugees from pre-war Germany, Austria and
Czechoslovakia, had been trapped behind German lines. A few thousand managed to
escape southwards through France, travelling on roads crowded by other refugees and
constantly strafed by German aircraft: several hundred reached the distant safety of
the Pyrenees, and of neutral Spain and Portugal. Others reached sanctuary in
Switzerland.
p 120
In Poland, the Germans had decided to set up a new concentration camp, organised by
SS men with previous experience of similar camps in Germany. The camp was
intended to serve as a place of punishment for Polish political prisoners. The site
chosen was in East Upper Silesia, a region annexed by Germany: the town, Oswiecim,
was known in German as Auschwitz.
The Commandant of the new camp, Rudolph Hoess, had arrived on April 29 with five
other SS men. On May 30, thirty more Germans, almost all of them convicted
criminals, had been sent from the concentration camp at Sachsenhausen, north of
Berlin, to serve as barrack chiefs, or Kapos. Then, in the first two weeks of June, three
hundred Jews from the town of Auschwitz were brought in to clean the site, a former
Austro-Hungarian artillery barracks of the First World War.
p 121
To defend their frontier with the Soviet Union, the Germans were constructing a
fortified line, the “Otto Line” in south-eastern Poland. Tens of thousands of Jews
were sent to the construction sites: to dig anti-tank ditches and artillery dugouts. Of
two thousand young men and women sent from Radom to work in the Zamosc region,
“almost all of them perished”. Of a thousand young men between the ages of
eighteen and twenty-five sent from Czestochowa in August 1940, “almost none
survived.” Thousands more were brought from independent Slovakia, a state
delighted to comply with the German request for labour-deportees.
p 123
On 1 August 1940 the first expulsion began from Cracow, with its eighty thousand
Jewish inhabitants and refugees. In the first two weeks of August, a third of the Jews
of Cracow were driven out to Warsaw and to other Polish towns. By the end of
October, fifty thousand had been deported.
p 123
Of the 400,000 Jews of Warsaw, more than 250,000 lived in the predominantly
Jewish district. The remaining 150,00 lived throughout the city, some Jews in almost
every street and suburb. On 3 October 1940, at the start of the Jewish New Year, the
German Governor of Warsaw, Ludwig Fischer, announced that all Jews living outside
the predominantly Jewish district would have to leave their homes and move to the
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Jewish area. Whatever belongings could be moved by hand, or on carts, could go with
them. The rest - the heavy furniture, the furnishings, the stock and equipment from
shops and businesses - had to be abandoned.
Warsaw was to be divided into three ‘quarters’: one for Germans, one for Poles, and
one for Jews. The Jews, who constituted a third of Warsaw’s population, were to
move into an area less than two and a half per cent of the total city: an area from
which even some overwhelmingly Jewish streets were to be excluded.
More than a hundred thousand Poles, living in the area designated for the Jews, were
likewise ordered to move, to the ‘Polish quarter.’ They too would lose their houses
and their livelihoods.
pp 127-129
Both Poles and Jews obeyed the fierce decree. Both, Chaim Kaplan noted in his diary
on October 22, “curse the murderer with the wish that his world darken in his lifetime,
just as he darkened their world by ordering them to do something against their will.”
p 130
On 15 November 1940 the Warsaw ghetto was officially declared to be in existence.
With only twenty-seven thousand apartments available in the area of the ghetto, six to
seven people were forced to live in each room.
pp 131-132
The four hundred thousand Jews of Warsaw, and the two million and more Jews
under German rule in November 1940, had no means of escape. But Jewish refugees
from central Europe who had reached Slovakia some months earlier had been able to
go by ship down the Danube and, once at the Black Sea, to sail to Palestine. p 133
On November 28, . . . a second anti-Jewish film
was given its premiere in Berlin. Der Ewige
Jude, ‘The Eternal Jew,’ was to be shown in
cinemas throughout Germany and Germanoccupied Europe. The film sought to explain the
part played by the Jews in world history. Scenes
of rats and Jews were juxtaposed. The Jews, like
the rats, were carriers of diseases, “money-mad
bits of filth devoid of all higher values,
corrupters of the world.”
These images fanned the vicious racism of
German propaganda, as they were designed to
do. When German soldiers entered the Warsaw
ghetto, they treated the Jews as vermin, entering
houses at will to steal whatever they could find. “A Jew does not dare to make a
sound of protest,” Chaim Kaplan noted on December 6. “There have been cases when
courageous Jews were shot in full view of their entire family, and the murderers were
not held responsible, because their excuse was that the filthy Jew cursed the Fuhrer
and it was their duty to avenge his honour.”
p 134
From Varna, in Bulgaria, a tiny craft of some 130 tons, the Salvador, had set out in
mid-November with more than three hundred and fifty Jewish refugees crammed on
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board. The British government, seeking to prevent their entry in Palestine, urged the
Turkish and Greek governments not to allow the ship through the Dardanelles, or into
the Aegean Sea. These urgings were unnecessary, however, for on December 12,
while still in the Sea of Marmora, the Salvador sank: two hundred of the refugees
were drowned, including seventy children. Five days later two British officials
responsible for refugee policy for central Europe exchanged notes. “If anything can
deter these poor devils from setting out for Zion, that story should,” wrote one, to
which the other replied: “I agree. There could have been no more opportune disaster
from the point of view of stopping this traffic.”
The ‘traffic’ did not stop.
p 135
January - June 1941: The Spreading Net
Mass deportations followed from all the
towns and villages west and south of
Warsaw. Between the end of January and
the end of March, more than seventy
thousand Jews were brought into the
ghetto, raising its population to nearly
half a million. “We ourselves,” Zivia
Luberkin later recalled, “lived twelve or
fifteen people to a room.” Refugees, she
added, were sent to special houses which
had somehow been evacuated of their
usual inhabitants. These were “the worst conditions” of the ghetto. . . .
There was no possibility, Zivia Lubertkin added, of separating the sick from the
healthy, “and sometimes it was impossible to separate the dead from the living, those
who died of starvation, children in the arms of their mothers.”
p 140
In Rumania, the anti-Jewish hatred of the Iron Guard burst out anew on 21 January
1941, when gangs of Legionnaires, some armed with guns, others with staves, hunted
for Jews in the streets. Thousands of Jews were caught and beaten, hundreds of shops
and houses were looted or burned, and twenty-five synagogues desecrated. After three
days of these manhunts, 120 Jews had been killed. As in German-occupied Europe,
these killings were carried out in a repulsive manner: “sadistic atrocities unsurpassed
in horror,” one of Churchill’s Private Secretaries described them, “taking hundreds of
Jews to cattle slaughterhouses and killing them according to the Jews’ own ritual
practices in slaughtering animals.” The bodies of many of those murdered were then
hung on meat hooks in the slaughterhouse, with placards around them announcing
‘Kosher meat.’
p 141
In January 1941, two thousand Jews had died of starvation in the Warsaw ghetto. The
February toll was just as high. “Almost daily,” Ringelblum noted on February 28,
“people are falling dead or unconscious in the middle of the street. It no longer makes
so direct an impression.” The streets themselves were “forever full of newly arrived
refugees.”
p 145
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In Lodz the rate of starvation was almost as high as in Warsaw. “Although the ghetto
of Lodz was initiated as a mere trial,” a Cologne newspaper commented on April 5,
“as a mere prelude to the solution of the Jewish question, it has turned out to be the
best and most perfect temporary solution.” A week later, the Germans announced
publicly that any Jews leaving the Lodz ghetto would be shot on sight.
Such shootings had already begun.
pp 146-147
On 20 May 1941 the Central Office of Emigration in Berlin sent a circular letter to all
German consulates, informing them that Goering had banned the emigration of Jews
from all occupied territories, including France, in view of the “doubtless imminent
final solution.” This was the first official reference to any such ‘final’ solution, or
Endlosung. Within two weeks, on June 2, the threat of arbitrary arrest was embodied
in a law authorizing the ‘administrative internment’ of all Jews in France, whether
French-born, or foreign-born.
p 152
‘It cannot happen!’
Operation Barbarossa, the German invasion of the Soviet Union launched on 22 June
1941, marked a tragic turning-point in German policy towards the Jews. In the
twenty-one months before Barbarossa, as many as thirty-thousand Jews had perished.
Of these, ten thousand had been murdered in individual killings, in street massacres,
in punitive reprisals, in outbreaks of savagery in the ghettos, and in the labour camps.
Twenty thousand had died of starvation in the Warsaw and Lodz ghettos. But in no
Jewish community had more than two or three per cent been murdered, while in
Western Europe, the Jews had been virtually unmolested.
From the first hours of Barbarossa, however, throughout what had once been eastern
Poland, Latvia, Lithuania and Estonia, as well as in the Ukraine, White Russia and the
western regions of the Russian Republic, a new policy was carried out, the systematic
destruction of entire Jewish communities. . . . In the advance of the invasion of
Russia, the SS leaders had prepared special killing squads, the Einsatzgruppen, which
set about finding and organizing local collaborators, Lithuanians and Ukrainians, in
murder gangs, and were confident that the anti-Jewish hatreds which existed in the
East could be turned easily to mass murder. In this they were right.
p 154
The slaughter in the East began from the
first day of the German invasion of the
Soviet Union. Helped by Lithuanian,
Latvian and Ukrainian policemen and
auxiliaries, the Einsatzgruppen moved
rapidly forward behind the advancing
German forces. An eye-witness later
recalled how, at the frontier village of
Virbalis, Jews “were placed alive in antitank trenches about two kilometres long
and killed by machine guns. Lime was thereupon sprayed upon them and a second
row of Jews was made to lie down. They were similarly shot.” Six more times, a new
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line of Jews were driven into the trench. “Only the children were not shot. They were
caught by the legs, their heads hit against stones and they were thereupon buried
alive.” p 155
Wherever possible, Jews tried to resist the killers. But the forces against them were
overwhelming. Sometimes the Jews succeeded, if only briefly, in halting the tide of
killing. At Lubieszow, Jews armed themselves with axes, hammers, iron bars and
pitchforks, to await the arrival of local Ukrainians intent upon murder as soon as the
Red Army withdrew, and before the Germans had arrived. The Ukrainians came, and
were beaten off. But then, retreating to the nearby village of Lubiaz, they fell
immediately upon the few isolated Jewish families living there. When, the following
morning, the Jews of Lubieszow’s self-defence group reached Lubiaz, “they found the
bodies of twenty children, women and men without heads, bellies ripped open, legs
and arms hacked off.”
p 157
The ferocity of hatred was not directed only against Jews. Russian prisoners-of-war
were also murdered in cold blood by the occupying forces. These Russians were
likewise unarmed, defeated, and at the mercy of the conqueror. But the Germans
showed them no mercy: by the end of the war, two and a half million Russian
prisoners-of-war had been murdered.
p 159
No day now passed without Jews being
murdered. In Kovno, on Saturday, June 28,
Lithuanian police joined with released convicts
to hunt through the streets with iron bars,
searching for Jews, and beating several hundred
to death. On June 29, in the Rumanian city of
Jassy, Rumanian soldiers and police went on the
rampage, watched by German SS men, killing at
least two hundred and sixty Jews in their homes.
At the same time, five thousand Jews were
arrested, marched through the streets while
being beaten continuously by Rumanian and
German police, shot if they fell, and, at the
railway station, forced to lie on the ground while
all their money, jewellery, rings and documents
were taken from them. Eventually they were put
into sealed cattle trucks, a hundred people and more in each, in two trains, without
food or water. . . .
By the time the train had reached Mirteshet, more than six hundred Jews had perished.
At Mirteshet, a further 327 had died, or were shot. At the next halt, Sabaoani, 172
bodies were taken out of the train, and at Roman, a further 53. While at Roman, the
surviving Jews were taken out of the train, made to strip naked in order to enter a
disinfectant bath in a sanitary train, and then forced to spend the night naked on the
ground. Fortunately, a local Christian woman, Viorica Agarici, head of the region’s
Red Cross, insisted that measures were taken to lessen the torment of the journey, and
some Jews were allowed out of the train altogether: but even of these, 143 died in the
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coming month. At the next stop, Imotesti, forty bodies were taken out, and at
Kalarash, the train’s destination, a further twenty-five. The journey from Jassy lasted
eight days.
Sixty-nine of the Jews who reached Kalarash were so weak that they did not survive
more than a few days in the Kalarash camp. From a second train sent from Jassy on
the same day, but in a different direction, 1,194 died: bringing the number of those
killed, according to the officially certified Rumanian police reports, to more than two
and a half thousand.
pp 161-163
In the East, throughout July, the
first victims were carefully
chosen so that the communities
immediately lost their natural
leadership. In Minsk, within
hours of the German occupation,
forty thousand men and boys
between the ages of fifteen and
forty-five were assembled for
‘registration,’ under penalty of
death: Jews, captured Soviet
soldiers, and non-Jewish
civilians. Taken to a field outside
the city, each group was put into a separate section. For four days all were kept in the
field, surrounded by machine guns and floodlights. Then, on the fifth day, all Jewish
members of the intelligentsia - doctors, lawyers, writers - were ordered to step
forward. Some two thousand did so, not knowing for what purpose they would be
needed, perhaps as administrators, as functionaries, or in their professional capacities.
Many non-professionals were among those who stepped forward, believing that this
group was to be given some privileged work or position, and wanting to be a part of
it. All two thousand were then marched off to a nearby wood, and machine-gunned.
p 166
With every day of the German advance into Russia, tens of thousands of Jews found
themselves trapped behind the German lines. So rapid was the advance that no one
could outrun it. Local units, Lithuanian or Ukrainian, joined in the hunt for victims.
Following the first furious slaughter in streets and homes, sites were chosen, such as
the Ninth Fort in Kovno, or the empty fuel pits at Ponary, outside Vilna, beyond the
view of witnesses.
The first Ponary executions took place on July 8. A hundred Jews at a time were
brought from the city to Ponary, to a ‘waiting zone.’ Here, in what had once been a
popular holiday resort for Vilna Jewry, they were ordered to undress and to hand over
whatever money or valuables they had with them. They were then marched naked,
single file, in groups of ten to twenty at a time, holding hands, to the edge
of the fuel pits, and shot down by rifle fire. After they had fallen into the pit, no
attempt was made to see if they were all dead. If anyone moved, another shot was
fired. The bodies were then covered, from above, with a thin layer of sand, and the
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next group of naked prisoners led from the waiting area to the edge of the pit. From
where they had waited, the people had heard the sound of rifle fire, but seen nothing.
In the twelve days following July 8, as many as five thousand Vilna Jews were
murdered this way. In the smaller towns and villages, whole communities could be
killed in a single day. On July 10, in the village of Jedwabne, all sixteen hundred Jews
were driven into the market place by the SS, tortured for several hours, then driven
into a barn and burned alive.
p 170
The speed and scale of the slaughter gave no time for organized resistance. The
Germans continued, in every town, to destroy the natural leaders. “By now,” reported
one Einsatzgruppe on July 24, from the town of Lachowicze, “the entire Jewish
intelligentsia has been liquidated (teachers, professors, lawyers etc . . .)”. Of the
professional classes, only doctors had been spared, to remain alive with the survivors
in a specially created ghetto. But the numbers killed exceeded by far the intelligentsia
of the town: this particular Einsatzgruppe reported, with the usual precision, a total of
4,435 ‘liquidated’ in Lachowicze.
p 172
Within five weeks of the German invasion of Russia on June 22, the number of Jews
killed exceeded the total number killed in the previous eight years of Nazi rule. The
invasion of Russia had provided the Germans with an opportunity hitherto lacking: a
remote region, the cover of an advancing army, vast distances, local collaborators, and
an intensified will to destroy. The first ‘five-figure’ massacre ended on July 31, in
Kishinev, after fourteen days’ uninterrupted slaughter, in which ten thousand Jews
were murdered. Similar mass executions were taking place in every city: in Zhitomir
more than two and a half thousand had been murdered.
p 175
On July 31, Goering had instructed Heydrich “to carry out all the necessary
preparations with regard to organizational and financial matters for bringing about a
complete solution of the Jewish question in the German sphere of influence in
Europe.” This was Goering’s second reference, the first having been two months
earlier, on May 20, to a ‘complete’ or ‘final’ solution of what the Germans chose to
call ‘the Jewish question.’
p 176
Goering’s letter of July 31 made it clear that something drastic was in preparation,
albeit at an early phase: a “complete solution,” unexplained, yet comprehensive.
Meanwhile, in the East, there was to be no respite in the savage, daily slaughter. “It
may be safely assumed,” Heydrich informed Himmler on August 1, “that in the future
there will be no more Jews in the annexed Eastern Territories.”
p 177
‘A crime without a name’
In August 1941, in the village of Kamien Koszyrski, the Chairman of the Jewish
Council, Shmuel Verble, was ordered to deliver a list of eighty names. He did so,
unaware of the purpose of the list. But when, after handing it over, he learned that the
Germans intended to kill all those on the list, he went at once to the local German
police post and asked to be included. His request was accepted. He was shot last: the
eighty-first victim.
p 181
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The daily murder of Jews in hundreds of smaller localities continued, unaffected by
the establishment of ghettos in the larger towns and cities. On August 15, the day of
confinement and apparent safety for the twenty-six thousand Jews in Kovno, six
hundred Jews in Stawiski, near Bialystok, were taken to the nearby woods and shot.
Only sixty remained alive, as forced labourers. That same day, at Rokiskis, a two-day
massacre began, in which 3,200 Jews were shot: men, women and children, together
with “5 Lithuanian Communists, 1 Pole, 1 partisan.” On the second day of the
Rokiskis killings, an official report drawn up in Berlin dwelt upon the attitude of the
Catholic Church in Lithuania. Bishop Brisgys, the report stated, “had forbidden
clergymen to help Jews in any form whatsoever. He rejected several Jewish
delegations who, approaching him personally, asked for intervention with the German
authorities. He will not admit any Jews at all in future.”
p 183
To prevent any show of Jewish resistance, the Germans resorted to massive reprisals.
After a single German policeman had been shot dead in an ambush, near Pinsk, the
Einsatzkommando unit in the area reported that, “as a reprisal, 4,500 Jews were
liquidated.” Jewish acts of defiance, however hopeless, were continuous. p 184
Every day in September 1941 Jews were
slaughtered by Einsatzkommando units.
Even in Vilna, despite the establishment
on September 6 of two ghettos, the
‘large’ and the ‘small,’ the killers soon
returned, taking to Ponar a further 3,434
Jews on September 12 and 1,267 five
days later. Of those murdered, according
to the careful statistics of the SS, 2,357
were women and 1,018 were children.
Even on the day of the setting up of the
ghetto, a day on which it was
intended to lull the Jews into some sense of security, killings had taken place. “When
I arrived at the ghetto,” Avraham Sutzkever later recalled, “I saw the following scene.
Martin Weiss - a member of the District Commissar's staff - came in with a young
Jewish girl. When we went in further he took out his revolver and shot her on the
spot. The girl’s name was Gitele Tarlo.” Gitele Tarlo was eleven years old.
pp 194-195
At Kiev, on September 27 and 28, posters throughout the city demanded the assembly
of Jews for ‘resettlement.’ More than thirty thousand reported. Because of “our
special talent for organisation,” the commander of the Einsatzkommando reported two
days later, “the Jews still believed to the very last moment before being executed that
indeed all that was happening was that they were being resettled.”
The Jews of Kiev were brought to Babi Yar, a ravine just outside the city. There, they
were shot down by machine-gun fire. Immediately after the war, a non-Jew, the
watchman at the old Jewish cemetery, near Babi Yar, recalled how Ukrainian
policemen:
formed a corridor and drove the panic-stricken people toward the huge glade, where
sticks, swearings, and dogs, who were tearing the people’s bodies, forced the people
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to undress, to form columns in hundreds, and then to go in the columns in twos
towards the mouth of the ravine.
At the mouth of the ravine, the watchman recalled:
They found themselves on the narrow ground above the precipice, twenty to twentyfive metres in height, and on the opposite side there were the Germans machine guns.
The killed, wounded and half-alive people fell down and were smashed there. Then
the next hundred were brought, and everything repeated again. The policemen took
the children by the legs and threw them alive down into the Yar.
That day the watchman witnessed “horrible scenes of human grief and despair.” In the
evening, he noted, “the Germans undermined the wall of the ravine and buried the
people under thick layers of earth. But the earth was moving long after, because
wounded and still alive Jews were still moving. One girl was crying: ‘Mammy, why
do they pour the sand into my eyes?’”
pp 202-203
After two days of shooting, the Einsatzkommando unit recorded the murder of 33,771
Jews at Babi Yar. The unit’s machine-gunners had been helped by the Ukrainian
militiamen. The same Einsatzkommando report also gave details of an even larger
slaughter further south, 35,782 ‘Jews and Communists’ killed in the Black Sea ports
of Nikolayev and Kherson.
p 206
From the end of June 1941 to the end of December, at least forty-eight thousand Jews
were murdered at Ponar. After the killings of September 3, six are known to have
crawled out of the pit alive, and survived. All of them were women.
p 207
On October 4, the Kovno ghetto was raided, and fifteen hundred Jews who had no
work permits were taken to the ninth Fort and murdered. But from the hospital in
Kovno, no one was taken away, even though none of them had work permits. Instead,
the building was locked, and then set on fire. Patients, doctors and nurses were burned
alive. “Even now,” Zalman Grinberg recalled three and a half years later, “I can see
the blazing hospital. It seems like a bad dream, but, alas, it was true!”
p 208
‘Write and record!’
That difficulty [transport] was being overcome. On October 16 the first of twenty
trains left Germany ‘for the East.’ By November 4 they had all completed their
journey, taking 19,837 Jews to the Lodz ghetto. One of these trains, with 512 Jews,
came from Luxembourg. Five trains, with 5,000 Jews in all, came from Vienna, a
similar number from Prague, and 4,187 in four trains, from Berlin. Other trains came
from Cologne, Frankfurt, Hamburg Dusseldorf. . . .
The ‘Western European’ Jews protested to the ghetto dwellers that, “somewhere along
the line, they had been led astray.” They had been told they were going “to some
industrial centre, where each of them would find suitable employment.” Some of them
even asked if they could not “reside in a hotel of some sort.” Losing their bearings,
they began to feel “small and hopeless.”
pp 213-214
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To the distress of the Einsatzgruppen, the local population in White Russia, one
commander reported, had “not proposed to take part in any pogroms,” a fact which
made ‘vigorous’ action by the Germans themselves all the more imperative. It was
experienced repeatedly, according to one Einsatzgruppen report, that “Jewish women
showed an especially obstinate behaviour.” For this reason, the report continued, “28
Jewesses had to be shot in Krugloje and 337 at Mogilev.”
p 217
On October 16 Rumanian and German forces
had occupied Odessa, after a two-month siege.
Six days later, at 5.35 in the afternoon, an
explosion blew up the Rumanian command
headquarters in the city. Seventeen Rumanian
and four German officers were killed, including
General Glogojeanu, head of Rumanian
Occupation Command. “I have taken steps,”
telegraphed Glogojeanu’s deputy, General
Trestioreanu, three hours later, “to hang Jews
and Communists in Odessa squares.” By noon
on the following day, October 23 , as the
reprisals gathered momentum, five thousand
civilians had been seized and shot, most of them Jews, of whom at least eighty
thousand had been unable to flee before the city was surrounded in August.
The campaign which now ensued against the Jews of Odessa was reported by the
Germans who witnessed it. That same morning,, October 23, nineteen thousand Jews
were assembled into a square near the port, which was surrounded by a wooden fence;
they were sprayed with gasoline and burnt alive. In the afternoon, the gendarmerie
and the police rounded up over twenty thousand persons in the streets - again, most of
them Jews - and squeezed them into the municipal jail. The next day, October 24, they
removed sixteen thousand Jews from the jail and led them out of the city in long
columns, in the direction of Dalnik, a nearby village.
When the first Jews reached Dalnik they were bound to one another’s arms in groups
of between forty and fifty, thrown into an anti-tank ditch and shot dead. When this
method proved too slow, they were pressed into four large warehouses which had
holes in the walls. Machine-gun nozzles were pushed into the holes, and in this
manner mass murder was committed in one warehouse after another. . . .
Following the massacres of October 23, 24 and 25, a further ten thousand Jews were
deported from Odessa to three concentration camps established near Golta:
Bogdanovka, Domanovka and Acmecetca. There, they were murdered two months
later, together with tens of thousands of other Jews who had been brought to these
camps from northern Transnistria and Bessarabia.
pp 217-219
Throughout the autumn of 1941, methods of mass murder were being devised which
were intended to be more efficient, and more secret, than the shooting hitherto
employed in the East. On October 25, as news of the previous day’s slaughter in the
streets of Vilna reached Berlin, Alfred Wetzel, an official in the Ministry for the
Occupied Eastern Territories, noted that Dr Viktor Brack, a member of Hitler’s
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Chancellery and an expert on euthanasia, had already “coordinated the supply of
instruments and apparatus for killing people through poison gas.” This was to be the
new method. . . .
To judge from the ‘actual situation,’ Wetzel added, “one need have no scruple in
using Brack’s method to liquidate Jews who are unsuitable for work.” In this way, it
would be possible to avoid ‘incidents’ such as occurred “during the shootings at Vilna
- and these shootings were public, according to the report that I have before me.”
Such public shootings “will no longer be possible or tolerated.”
p 219
A new policy was emerging: to deport, and to gas, and to do so unobserved by
passers-by or curious soldiers: to take the killings off the streets and away from the
environs of the towns and cities. It was to take several months before this policy could
be put into effect. But with the German army at the gates of Moscow, British forces
on the defensive in Egypt, and the United States still neutral, the Germans had time
enough.
pp 221-222
The evolving plans for murder by gas would ensure that most future killings would be
done behind a mask of secrecy, by methods which far fewer people would have to
see, and in circumstances which would reduce to a minimum the chance of disgust or
discovery. In anticipation of the new method, individual Jews were now refused
permission to emigrate, even within regions under German influence.
p 222
Rauca continued all day with the selection, clutccing a leather whip with metal tips,
drinking coffee, and munching sandwiches, his dog at his feet. One by one, as people
stepped forward, his voice could be heard calling, ”You left, you right.” For Rauca,
recalled Leon Bauminger, “Right was death and left was life.” . . . .
Those Kovno Jews who were sent by Rauca to the right could still not believe that
they had really been marked out for death. “That morning in Democracy Square,” a
Lithuanian doctor, Helen Kutorgene, noted in her diary, “nobody suspected that a
bitter fate awaited them. They thought that they were being moved to other
apartments.”. . . .
Dr Kutorgene added that once the Jews whom Rauca had sent to the right realised
where they were being sent:
They broke out crying, wailed, screamed. Some tried to escape on the way there but
they were shot dead. many bodies remained in the fields. At the fort the condemned
were stripped of their clothes, and in groups of three hundred they were forced into
the ditches. First they threw in the children. The women were shot at the edge of the
ditch, after that it was the turn of the men. Many were covered while they were still
alive. All the men doing the shooting were drunk. I was told all this by an
acquaintance who heard it from a German soldier, an eye-witness, who wrote to his
Catholic wife: “Yesterday I became convinced that there is no God. If there were, He
would not allow such things to happen.”
The massacre had been carried out by German SS men and Lithuanian police. On
return from the killing, one of the Lithuanians ‘boasted’ - as a Jew, Alter Galperin
later recalled – “that he had dragged small Jewish children by the hair, stabbing them
with the edge of his bayonet, and throwing them half alive into pits.” The smallest
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children “he just threw into the pit alive, because to kill all of them first was too much
work.”
pp 224-226
The number of those murdered was recorded, once again, in the precise statistics of
the Einsatzkommando: “2,007 Jewish men, 2,920 Jewish women, 4,273 Jewish
children.” There was the added comment, “cleaning the ghetto of superfluous Jews.”
Of the total death toll of 9,200 nearly half were children.
p 227
German Jews were also deported to Riga
and Kovno. On November 27 the first of
nineteen trains left the Reich for Riga: it
came from Berlin. Even as this train was
on its way from Berlin, the Riga ghetto
was the object of a massive raid, during
which 10,600 Jews were seized, taken to
the pits in the nearby Rumbuli forest,
and shot. When the train from Berlin
arrived a few days later, most of the
thousand German Jews were likewise
taken out to
Rumbuli, and killed. Then, in a second, three-day raid on the Riga ghetto, from
December 7 to December 9, a further twenty-five thousand Riga Jews were killed,
among them the eighty-one-year-old Doyen of Jewish historians, Simon Dubnov. . . .
With this second Rumbuli massacre, eighty per cent of Riga Jewry had been
murdered. The few survivors were put into a forced labour camp, ‘the little ghetto,’
the women being imprisoned separately from the men. The Riga ghetto was ready for
any further deportees from Germany.
pp 229-230
A further fifteen thousand German Jews were sent to Kovno, principally from Berlin,
Munich, Vienna, Breslau and Frankfurt. An eye-witness in Kovno, Dr Aharon Peretz,
later recalled how, as the deportees were being led along the road which went past the
ghetto, towards the Ninth Fort, they could be heard asking the guards, “Is the camp
still far?” They had been told they were being sent to a work camp. But, as Peretz
added, “We know where that road led. It led to the ninth Fort, to the prepared pits.”
But first, the Jews from Germany were kept for three days in underground cellars,
with ice-covered walls, and without food or drink. Only then, frozen and starving,
were they ordered to undress taken to the pits, and shot.
p 230
Throughout the late autumn and early winter of 1941, details had filtered through to
the West of many eastern executions. On November 14, in a message to the Jewish
Chronicle on its centenary, Winston Churchill gave public recognition to the Jewish
suffering, “None has suffered more cruelly than the Jew,” he wrote, “the unspeakable
evils wrought on the bodies and spirits of men by Hitler and his vile regime. The Jew
bore the brunt of the Nazis' first onslaught upon the citadels of freedom and human
dignity. He has borne and continues to bear a burden that might have seemed to be
beyond endurance. He has not allowed it to break his spirit: he has never lost the will
to resist.”
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Churchill’s message continued: “Assuredly in the day of victory the Jews’ sufferings
and his part in the struggle will not be forgotten. Once again, at the appointed time, he
will see vindicated those principles of righteousness which it was the glory of his
fathers to proclaim to the world. Once again it will be shown that, though the mills of
God grind slowly, yet they grind exceedingly small.”
pp 231-232
Inside the Warsaw ghetto, the deaths from
starvation were accelerated by the winter cold.
“The most fearful sight is that of freezing
children,” Ringelblum noted in mid-November.
“Little children with bare feet, bare knees and
torn clothing stand dumbly in the street weeping.
Tonight, the 14th, I heard a tot of three or four
yammering. The child will probably be found
frozen to death tomorrow morning, a few hours
off.” Six weeks earlier, Ringelblum recalled,
when the first snow had fallen, some seventy
children were “found frozen to death on the
steps of ruined houses.”
p 232
The deaths from cold continued: “In the streets,”
Mary Berg noted on November 22, “frozen
human corpses are an increasingly frequent
sight.” Sometimes a mother “cuddles a child
frozen to death, and tries to warm the inanimate little body. Sometimes a child
huddles against his mother, thinking that she is asleep and trying to awaken her,
while, in fact, she is dead.”
p 233
The Eastern murders continued throughout November 1941. At Liepaja, however, all
such shootings had been forbidden by direct orders from the Reich Commissar for the
‘Ostland’ region of the Baltic, Hinrich Lohse. asked by his superiors in Berlin why he
had halted the executions, Lohse replied on November 15 that “the manner in which
they were performed could not be justified.” Not moral, but economic reasons, were
his complaint: the destruction of much manpower that could be of use to the war
economy. Was it intended, Lohse asked, that Jews were to be killed, “irrespective of
age, sex or economic factors.”
A month later Lohse was informed, by the Ministry of Occupied Eastern Territories,
that “as a matter of principle, no economic factors are to be taken into consideration in
the solution of the Jewish question.” Only a fragment of Eastern Jewry had been kept
alive for work purposes. On December 1, the chief of Einsatzkommando 3, SS
Colonel Karl Jaeger, reported to Berlin that only fifteen per cent of Lithuanian Jewry
remained alive. All of them he explained, were Arbeitsjuden, working Jews.
p 234
In Kovno itself, Jaeger reported, ‘trained’ Lithuanians were available “in sufficient
numbers.” As a result, the city was, as he expressed it, “comparatively speaking a
shooting paradise.” Jaeger added that in his view “the male work-Jews should be
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26
sterilized immediately to prevent any procreation.” A Jewess who, “nevertheless,”
was pregnant “is to be liquidated.”
p 325
In the General Government of Poland, and in Western Europe, it was not the
massacres in a nearby ravine, as at Nowogrodek, but deportation to distant sites, as far
as a thousand miles away, that was emerging as the plan: with gassing, not shooting,
as the method of death.
pp 236-237
On November 24 . . . a ghetto
was set up in the eighteenthcentury fortress of the Bohemian
town of Theresienstadt, to which
Jews were to be sent from
throughout the Old Reich, and in
particular from Vienna, Prague
and Berlin. Uprooted from their
homes, penniless, deprived of
their belongings, ill-fed,
overcrowded, thirty-two thousand
were to die there of hunger and
disease.
p 238
Neither deportation to the eastern ghettos nor deportation to Theresienstadt was the
‘final solution.’ That was still being prepared, brought one step nearer than October,
at Buchenwald, when twelve hundred Jews had been medically examined by Dr Fritz
Mennecke, a euthanasia expert, and then subjected to “Action 14 f 13” in a clinic at
Bernberg, one hundred miles away. “Action 14 f 13” was death by gassing: a method
in use since 1939 in the mass murder of tens of thousands of mentally defective
Germans in more than a dozen special institutions.
p 238
In Germany, the chief of the Criminal Police Office in Stuttgart, Christian Wirth, an
expert in tracking down criminals - took charge of the technical side of a more
‘humane’ method of killing, constructing gas-chambers in which the victim was
exposed to carbon monoxide gas, “a device”, one SS officer later explained, “which
overwhelmed its victims without their apprehension and which caused them no pain.”
Between January 1940 and August 1941, more than seventy thousand Germans had
been killed by gas in five separate euthanasia institutions, by what was called
sonderbehandlung, ‘special treatment.’ The principal victims were the chronically
sick, gypsies, people judged ‘unworthy of life’ because of mental disorders, and, after
June 1941, Soviet prisoners-of-war.
On 3 September 1941, at Auschwitz Main Camp, hitherto used principally for the
imprisonment and torture of Polish opponents of Nazism, an experiment had been
carried out against six hundred Soviet prisoners-of-war, and three hundred Jews,
brought specially to the camp. There, in the cellar of Block 11, a gas called Cyclon B,
prussic acid initially in crystal forms, was used to murder the chosen victims. The
experiment was judged a success.
pp 238-239
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On 7 December 1941, as the first seven hundred Jews were being deported to the
death camp at Chelmno, Japanese aircraft attacked the United States Fleet at Pearl
Harbour. Unknown at the time either to the Allies or to the Jews of Europe,
Roosevelt’s day that would “live in infamy” was also the first day of the ‘final
solution.’
p 240
The ‘final solution’
The killings in the East were not restricted to Jews. On the night of December 21, the
bodies of several thousand Soviet prisoners-of-war were laid out by the Germans
along a six-kilometer stretch of road in Minsk. On the previous day most of the
Russians had been deliberately frozen to death in a march across the open fields.
Some had been shot when, in desperation, they had sought some shelter from the
fierce wind. In Vilna, when thousands of Jews were driven from the ghetto to the
railway junction after a heavy blizzard, to clear snow from the lines, they found
hundreds of Soviet prisoners-of-war shoveling the snow, half-naked, many of them
without boots. “Among the Jews,” Reuben Ainsztein has written, “was my sister
Mania Liff, who saw a Jewish woman give a piece of bread to a Russian. This was
noticed by a German guard who at once shot dead both the Russian and the Jewess.”
p 246
At Chelmno, the gassing of whole communities was continuing day by day. Gypsies,
too, were among the first victims. On January 7, the first of five thousand Gypsies,
who had earlier been deported to the Jewish ghetto in Lodz from their encampments
in Germany, were taken from Lodz to Chelmno by truck. All were gassed. With them
was a Jewish doctor, Dr Fickelburg, and a Jewish nurse, whose name is unknown.
They had been working as a medical team in the Gypsy section of the ghetto. They
too were gassed.
On January 9, a thousand Jews from the nearby village of Klodawa were deported to
Chelmno. Every one was gassed.
The deportation of Gypsies from the Lodz ghetto having been completed, on January
13 the deportation began of ten thousand Jews from the Lodz ghetto, also to Chelmno,
at the carefully controlled rate of seven hundred a day. To lull the deportees with a
belief in ‘resettlement,’ they had been made to exchange whatever Polish or other
money they had into German marks. They were also told that they could either sell
their furniture, or leave it ‘for safekeeping’ at the carpenters’ shops in the ghetto.
Before leaving, each deportee was given a ‘free distribution’ of clothing: warm
underwear, earmuffs, gloves, stockings, socks and clogs. They were also given “half a
loaf of bread and a sausage for the road.”
The Chronicle of the Lodz ghetto recorded with precision the number of deportees:
5,353 men and 5,750 women. The Chronicle only knew that they had been ‘resettled,’
not that they had been deported to Chelmno, and gassed.
pp 250-251
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20 January 1942. The Wannsee Conference
The Wannsee Conference took place on 20 January 1942. The notes which were taken
of its deliberations make no reference to the gassings which had taken place at
Chelmno throughout the previous forty-four days; a period during which more than
forty thousand Jews and Gypsies had been murdered. According to the notes of the
Conference, Heydrich began telling the assembled senior civil servants of his
appointment “as Plenipotentiary for the Preparation of the Final Solution of the
European Jewish Question.” As a result of this appointment , he told them, it was his
aim “to achieve clarity in essential matters.” Heydrich went on to tell the Conference
that Goering had asked to see “a draft project” of this “final solution.” Such a draft, he
added, would require “prior joint consultation” of all the ministries involved “in view
of the need for parallel procedure.” . . . .
Heydrich then explained that this “final solution” concerned, not only those Jews who
were already under German rule, but “some eleven million Jews” throughout Europe.
The figures presented by Heydrich included 34,000 for Lithuania. The other 200,000
Jews of pre-war Lithuania had, though he did not say so, been murdered between July
and November 1941 by Einsatzgruppe A, their numbers meticulously listed town by
town and village by village in Colonel Jaeger's report of December 1941.
pp 280-281
The senior officials present at the Wannsee Conference were from the Ministry for the
Occupied Eastern Territories, the Ministry of the Interior, the Justice Ministry, the
Foreign Office, the General Government of Poland, the Chancellery, and the Race and
Resettlement Office. Also present was the Plenipotentiary for the Four Year Plan,
responsible for disposing of Jewish property. All were asked by Heydrich to
cooperate “in the implementation of the solution.”
p 281
By the end of 1942, the Germans needed only to establish the apparatus of total
destruction: death camps in remote areas, rolling stock, timetables, confiscation
patterns, deportation schedules, and camps; and then to rely upon the tacit, unspoken,
unrecorded connivance of thousands of people: administrators and bureaucrats who
would do their duty, organize round-ups, supervise detention centres, coordinate
schedules, and send local Jews on their way to a distant ‘unknown destination,’ to
‘work camps’ in ‘Poland,’ to ‘resettlement’ in ‘the East.’
The officials present at the Wannsee Conference had agreed with Heydrich’s
suggestion that the “final solution” should be carried out in coordination with
Heydrich’s own ‘department head,’ Adolf Eichmann.
p 284
In addition to the technical arrangements involving thousands of trains and tens of
thousands of miles, a complex system of subterfuge had to be created, whereby the
idea of ‘resettlement’ could be made to appear a tolerable one.
All this was done by Eichmann’s section, whose representatives were soon active in
France, Belgium, Holland, Luxembourg, Norway, Rumania, Greece, Bulgaria,
Hungary and Slovakia. Regular meetings were held in Berlin to coordinate the
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complex yet essential aspect of the impending deportations: the despatch of full trains
and the return of empty trains.
p 284
Most of the deportees were
gassed within hours of their
arrival, husbands with their
wives, mothers with their
children, the old, the sick, the
infirm, pregnant women, babies;
no exceptions were made and no
mercy was shown. Later, camps
were to be set up at which as
many as half of the
deportees were ‘selected’ for
forced labour, but at Chelmno, Belzec, Sobibor and Treblinka no such ‘selections’
were made. In these four camps, between the early months of 1942 and the first
months of 1943, many hundreds of Jewish communities were to be wiped out in their
entirety: more than fifty communities at Chelmno alone. Yet within a few months
Chelmno was to prove the second smallest of the four death camps; a camp at which,
nevertheless, at least 360,000 Jews were killed within a year.
p 286
From Belzec there were to be no more than two survivors, from Chelmno only three,
from Treblinka less than forty, and from Sobibor a total of sixty-four; while from
Auschwitz-Birkenau, several thousand Jews were to survive.
p 287
In Yugoslavia, in the first week of
January, Hungarian soldiers ran amok,
killing several thousand Jews and Serbs.
On January 23, at Novi Sad, 550 Jews
and 292 Serbs were driven on to the ice
of the Danube, which was then shelled.
The ice broke, and the victims drowned.
At Stari Becej, on January 26 and the
two following days, a hundred Jews and
a hundred Serbs were slaughtered. At
Titel, thirty-five of the thirty-six Jews living in the village were killed. These killings,
seen and publicized, led the Hungarian government to charge the senior Hungarian
officer responsible for the murder of six thousand Serbs and four thousand Jews:
before he could be brought to trial, however, he fled to Germany.
pp 287-288
Six weeks after the Wannsee Conference, a second death camp was opened, at Belzec.
In those six weeks, in addition to the continuing gassings at Chelmno, tens of
thousands of Jews were to die elsewhere: the largest number, 5,123, died of starvation
in Warsaw in January. Thousands also died in each of the ghettos in the General
Government, and, further east, in White Russia, the Ukraine and Volhynia, of
starvation, typhus and shooting.
p 288
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On January 12 the deportations from the Slobodka ‘ghetto’ began. Within six weeks,
a total of 19,582 Odessa Jews, the majority women, children and old people, had been
taken by rail in sealed trucks to Berezovka, and then on to two concentration camps in
the Goltas district. . . .
Once the deportees had reached the Golta district, Dora Litani has written, they were
sent to two camps, one at Bogdanovka, the other at Domanovka. There they were
packed into partly destroyed houses, without doors or windows, and into warehouses,
stables and pigpens. “Disease cut short the lives of hundreds of people, for they lay
without food or medical care.” Those capable of working were sent to farms in the
region, some nearby, others some distance away. “They lived like work-animals, but
unlike animals they received neither food nor care of any kind.”
Within a year and a half, almost none of these 19,582 deportees were alive. Most had
died of starvation, severe cold, untreated disease, or in repeated mass executions in
which several hundreds would be shot at a time.
p 289
This Viennese transport reached Riga on February 10. It was met at the station by Dr
Rudolph Lange, one of the Nazi officials who had been present at the Wannsee
Conference. Gertrude Schneider later recalled how Lange told these latest arrivals that
those who were “unwilling or unable” to walk the seven kilometers to the ghetto
could make the journey on trucks which had been especially reserved for them. “In
this way,” he said, “those of you who ride can prepare a place for those who walk.”
Gertrude Schneider's account continued:
It was an extremely cold day - forty-two degrees below zero, to be exact - and so the
majority of the hapless, unsuspecting Jews from Vienna took his advice and lined up
to board the trucks. They did not know that those greyish-blue trucks had been
manufactured by the Saurer Works in Austria especially for the implementation of
the ‘final solution.’ These trucks were the famous gas-vans, which were used from
time to time despite the fact that the SS did not especially like them because they
always had mechanical problems.
At the time of the arrival of this train on February 10, more than five thousand of the
twenty thousand Riga Jews who had come from the Reich had already been murdered.
pp 290-291
‘Journey into the unknown’
Throughout February 1942 the deportations to the death camp at Chelmno continued,
systematically destroying the Jewish communities of western Poland. Also throughout
February, gas-chambers were under construction at Belzec and Sobidor. But even as
these preparations were being made, the Jews of German-occupied Poland and
western Russia continued to suffer from the earlier German policies of spasmodic
massacre and deliberate starvation. In the Warsaw ghetto, deaths from starvation in
1941 had approached the horrific total of fifty thousand.
p 294
On February 12, when three thousand Jews were rounded up in the Ukrainian town of
Brailov, to be marched away for execution, the Council Elder there, Josef Kulok,
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refused an offer to join the skilled workers who were to be spared, and chose to die
with the community.
p 295
In the second week of March 1942,
deportations began from central Europe
to the region of the new death camp at
Belzec. The first deportees were 1,001
Jews from the ghetto at Theresienstadt.
Their train, ‘Transport Aa,’ left the
ghetto on March 11, reaching the village
of Izbica Lubelska, north of Belzec, two
days later. At Isbica they were kept in
the ghetto, made to clear rubble, and
later sent to Belzec. Of the 1,001 Jews in
the first deportation from Therresienstadt, only six survived the war. . . .
Of the six hundred thousand Jews deported to this single death camp, only two are
known to have survived.
p 302
The village-by-village massacres in German-occupied Russia had continued without
respite throughout the early months of 1942. No village was too remote, no Jewish
community too small, to be overlooked. On the night of March 16 it was upon the
1,816 Jews of the village of Pochep that the execution squads descended. All were
‘brutally killed’ in an anti-tank ditch just outside the village, as a memorial stone in
the local cemetery records.
p 307
At this “monstrous camp,” [Belzec] more than six hundred thousand Jews were
murdered in less than a year. No selection was made to keep alive those capable of
work: only a few hundred were chosen to be a part of a Sonderkommando, or ‘Special
Commando,’ some employed in taking the bodies of those who had been gassed to the
burial pits, others in sorting the clothes of the victims and in preparing those clothes
and other belongings for dispatch to Germany. Eventually, the members of this
Sonderkommando were also murdered. “The procedure is pretty barbaric,” Josef
Goebbels noted in his diary on March 27, “one not to be described here most
definitely. Not much will remain of the Jews.”
pp 308-309
At Belzec, the man in charge of the killings was Christian Wirth, who was also given
the task of choosing someone to organize a third death camp, at Sobibor. Wirth chose
Franz Stangl, who went to prepare the site at Sobibor, helped by Michel Hermann,
formerly the head nurse at the largest of the German euthanasia centres, Schloss
Hartheim. Stangl later recalled his first visit to Belzec, by car from Sobibor. “The
smell,” he said, “oh God, the smell. It was everywhere.”
p 311
Throughout Eastern Europe, rumours abounded as to some sinister fate for the
growing number of Jews being deported ‘to the East.’ But the exact nature of that fate
was still unknown. Also unknown was the reason: the “final solution,” worked out
administratively at Wannsee, remained a tight secret. Even so, evidence that the
killings were not to be limited to a single region, or to chance, began to be clear to the
Jews in Warsaw towards the end of March 1942, with a second messenger with evil
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tidings. The first had been Heniek Grabowski, who had brought with him in
November 1941 an account of the mass killings in Vilna that autumn. The second was
Yakov Grojanowski, who now gave his eye-witness account of the disposal of the
murdered Jews and Gypsies at Chelmno.
pp 313-314
The Germans were determined to maintain total deception. “The Reichsfuhrer
desires,” wrote Himmler’s personal secretary to the Inspector for Statistics on April
10, “that no mention be made of the ‘special treatment of the Jews.’ It must be called
‘transportation of the Jews towards the Russian East.’ Even ‘special treatment’ –
sonderbehandlung - was understood to be too explicit a term.
p 319
In mid-April a new death camp was ready to receive deportees. This was Sobibor
camp, in a remote woodland area near the River Bug. As at Chelmno and Belzec,
there were to be almost no survivors: the aim of the camp was to kill, not to segregate
and preserve for forced labour.
pp 324-325
‘Another journey into the unknown’
Unable to conceive of his own death, a man, even when surrounded by the death of
others, grasps at any hope or rumour that might distance him from the realisation that
he himself might be marked out for death. Any rumour which confirms that death
might not be in prospect is acceptable. It was this psychological mechanism, the
impossibility of conceiving one’s own death, that gave the hopeful rumours their
force, and laid the groundwork for the deceptions that were to come. One might fear
the worst, one might dread it, one might be told of it in the starkest terms, but one
would not believe it. Even harder to grasp was the pathology of those who were
committing the murders.
Not only among the outside world of Allies and neutrals, but among the Jews
themselves in the midst of these terrible events, it was impossible fully to conceive
that a child could be butchered in the way that so many hundreds of thousands of
Jewish children had already been butchered. Yet once it had proved impossible for the
Jews who witnessed these horrors to enter into the pathology of their persecutors, then
it was possible for hope also to survive, which the full realisation of what was taking
place would long before have destroyed.
p 333
At Auschwitz, as at Chelmno, Belzec and Sobibor, the Germans set up one of the
most hellish aspects of the death camp system, the Sonderkommando, selecting a
small number of Jews for a special team, whose job was to dispose of the corpses of
those who had been murdered. At the nearby village and birch wood of Birkenau, in
the summer of 1942, the task of the Auschwitz Sonderkommando was to dig up the
burial pits near the camp, then to drag the corpses from the pits to specially
constructed crematoria, where they were burnt to ash. Anyone who refused this work
was shot on the spot by one of the SS guards.
p 340
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‘If they have enough time, we are lost’
On May 30, [1942] over Germany, the British launched their first bombing raid with a
thousand bombers. Their target was Cologne. Thirty-nine of the bombers were shot
down.
p 353
On 27 May 1942, SS General Reinhard Heydrich was fatally wounded in Prague by
two Czech patriots parachuted into German-occupied Czechoslovakia from Britain.
As Deputy Protector for Bohemia and Moravia, Heydrich’s name had become a
byword for repression. At the Wannsee Conference four months earlier, he had
presided over the bureaucratic confirmation of the “final solution.”
Following the attack on Heydrich, and even before his death eight days later, SS
General Odilo Globocnik began preparations for what was called ‘Operation
Reinhard,’ the deportation of Jews to Treblinka, Belzec and Sobibor to their
immediate deaths. Two weeks later, a thousand Jews were deported from Prague to
death in the East. At the same time, in a reprisal action on Czech soil, 199 Czech men
and boys were murdered in the mining village of Lidice. The village was then burned
to the ground. . . .
As Operation Reinhard gathered
momentum, the deportation of Jews was
accelerated from the Reich itself. The
background of Heydrich’s assassination
was not yet clear, wrote Josef Geobbels
at the end of May, but “in any event we
are holding the Jews to account. I am
ordering the arrest of 500 Berlin Jews
which I had been planning, and I am
informing the Jewish community leaders
that for every Jewish assassination and
for every attempt at revolt on the part of
Jews, 100 or 150 Jews in our hands will
be shot.” In the wake of the Heydrich
assassination, several hundred Jews had
already been shot in Sachsenhausen.
“The more of this filth that is eliminated,” Goebbels added, “the better for the security
of the Reich.”
pp 363-364
Of the thousand Jews sent from Prague on June 10, as part of Operation Reinhard, the
only survivor was a man who jumped from the train during the journey. There were
no survivors at all of the thousand deportees from Theresienstadt on June 12. Nor was
there a single survivor of a further thousand sent from Theresienstadt on June 13 “to
an unknown destination in the East.”
p 364
Chaim Kaplan noted in his diary on June 9, ”there was one mother who fought like a
lioness and refused to turn her baby over to the murderers. They immediately grabbed
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the baby and hurled it out of the window.” That month in Sosnowiec, Frieda Mazia
later recalled, the Germans entered the Jewish hospitals, “took women after childbirth,
people after operations; they took all the babies from the children’s ward and threw
them from the second floor into large trucks in the street.” All those in the hospitals
were supposed to be going “to new settlements.” They were sent, in fact, to
Auschwitz, and gassed.
p 365
Five young Sosnowiec Jews decided to try to steal weapons from an apartment lived
in by a German officer. One of these Jews, Harry Blumenfrucht, was caught. He tried
to shoot the German who seized him. This German was known throughout the district
as ‘Dog with Dog,’ because he was always with his dog. The dog sunk his teeth into
Blumenfrucht's hand, making it impossible for him to shoot.
Under torture, Blumenfrucht refused to betray his four colleagues. As Frieda Mazia
recalled:
They put chips of wood under his fingernails and put fire to them. They put him on
an iron net and held him there for forty-eight hours, without a stop. And when he
screamed, all he said was, “I will not speak. I am dead, in any case.”
They brought his mother and she prayed and begged with him, “Harry, to shorten
your torture - you will not come out alive - but just to shorten your torture admit
something.” Harry said nothing. He told his mother, “I am doomed. I will not
speak.” The Germans kept him, I believe, two weeks. And they admired the boy.
Usually people were hanged in public and Jews were ordered to come and watch.
Harry they hanged before dawn, during curfew hours, because they were afraid.
They saw there was something unusual in the man.
p 366
‘Avenge our tormented people’
On 7 July 1942 a meeting took place in Berlin, presided over by Himmler. Three
other men were also present: the head of the Concentration Camp Inspectorate, SS
General Richard Glueks; the hospital chief, SS Major-General, and also Professor
Gebhardt; and a leading German gynaecologist, Professor Clauberg. As a result of
their discussion, it was decided to start medical experiments in “major dimensions” on
Jewish women at Auschwitz.
p 373
Auschwitz was now ready to receive Jews from all over Europe: to gas the old, the
sick, the inform and the young, and to ‘select’ the able-bodied for forced labour, and
for medical experiments. On July 15 the first two thousand deportees were sent from
Holland to Auschwitz. Most of them were German Jews who had found refuge in
Holland between 1933 and 1939.
p 375
From Warsaw to Treblinka: ‘These disastrous and horrible days’
On July 21 the Germans seized sixty Jews in the Warsaw ghetto, among them three
members of the Jewish Council. At the same time, a number of Jews were shot in the
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streets, or in their homes. On the following day, July 22, a telegram was received at
Treblinka station “informing us,” as the Polish railwayman Franciszek Zabecki
recalled, “of the running of a shuttle service from Warsaw to Treblinka with settlers.”
The trains would be made up of sixty covered goods wagons. After unloading, the
trains were to be sent back to Warsaw. “Our astonishment was immense. We
wondered what sort of settlers they were, where they were going to live and what they
were going to do? We connected this news with the mysterious buildings in the
forest.”
pp 387-388
That same day, July 22, the ghetto walls were surrounded by Ukrainian and Latvian
guards, in SS uniforms, armed, and at twenty-five-yard intervals. The round-up and
deportation of Jews from Warsaw now began. Adolf Berman, who was responsible
for many of the orphanages in the ghetto, later recalled:
On that very day, the first victims were the Jewish children, and I shall never forget
the harrowing scenes and the blood-curdling incidents when the SS men most cruelly
attacked children - children roaming in the streets; took them by force to carts, and I
remember, fully, those children were defending themselves. Even today the cries and
shrieking of those children are clear in my mind. “Mama, Mama,” this is what we
heard. “Save us, mothers.”
The deportations from Warsaw
continued, almost without pause,
until September 12. In those
weeks, a total of 265,000 Jews
were sent by train for
“resettlement in the East.” Their
actual destination was Treblinka,
and its three gas-chambers.
Death, not slave labour, was their
fate. It was the largest slaughter
of a single community, Jewish or
non-Jewish, in the Second World
War.
No one book, certainly no one chapter, can tell the story of those seven weeks, each
day of which saw the murder of more than four thousand Jews. Merely to list the
names of the murdered ones, a line for each name, would take nearly seven thousand
printed pages.
pp 388-389
On July 28, six days after the deportations had begun, and when it was clear that they
were to continue on a substantial scale, young Jews from the pioneer youth
movements met to discuss the possibility of resistance. “Various questions were
raised at that meeting,” Zivia Lubetkin later recalled. “’What can we do? We have no
guns. . . . ‘” One idea was to flee top somewhere safe, outside Warsaw. “We rejected
this idea. How many Jews can we save that way? Very few. Is there any point in
trying to save those few when millions are dying? No, we all will share the same fate
and it is our duty to stay with our people until the very end.”
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At this meeting of July 28, a Jewish Fighting Organization was set up, known by its
Polish initials ZOB, Zydowska Organizacja Bojowa. The meeting decided: “We, the
youth, would take all the responsibility on our shoulders.” At that moment there were
“only two pistols in our entire arsenal.” The Jewish Fighting Organization made one
of its first tasks to try to link up the different ghettos, to prepare joint schemes, to
smuggle arms and individuals, and to pass on messages and funds.
p 396
Autumn 1942: ‘At a faster pace’
The need for speed had become a driving force behind the daily measures. On July 24
the Under-Secretary of State at the German Foreign Ministry, Martin Luther, warned
Ribbentrop of the Italian government’s continued resistance to any deportation plans
from the Italian-occupied zone of Croatia. The Italian Chief of Staff in Mostar, Luther
reported, “has declared that he cannot give his approval to the resettlement of the
Jews, all inhabitants of Mostar having received assurance of equal treatment.”
No such problems existed in either the General Government, or the Occupied Eastern
Territories.
p 402
During August 1942, Jews from more than twenty communities in Eastern Galicia,
one of the heartlands of the Jewish diaspora, were deported to Belzec, among them
more than forty thousand from Lvov, beginning on August 10 and lasting until
August 23, turned the city, as one of those present later recalled, “into a city of
nightmare and blood.” . . . .
Among those driven from their homes in the Eastern Galician town of Czortkow in
the early hours of August 27 was Zonka Pollak. She later recalled that night, when
several thousand Jews were assembled on the square near the Bristol Hotel, “watching
the scenes of children being shot to death in their mothers’ hands and thrown from the
balconies.”
pp 410-411
‘The most horrible of all horrors’
More than four hundred thousand Jews were murdered in German-occupied Europe in
August 1942. Neither their suffering, nor their courage, can be adequately conveyed
in words. So little is known of the fate and reactions of individuals. Statistics can dull
the mind, and examples numb it. Nevertheless, the historian must try, through the
records and stories that have survived, to give an insight into the many different ways
in which individuals met their death. Those who remembered such stories, and who
retold them, did so in order that the fate of individuals would not be forgotten. Rudolf
Reder recalled an incident shortly after his arrival in Belzec on August 11:
Soon after my arrival at Belzec, one very young boy was selected from each
transport. (I don't know where he was from as we didn’t know the origin of the
transports). He was a fine example of health, strength and youth. We were surprised
by his cheerful manner. He looked around and said quite happily, “Has anyone ever
escaped from here?”
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It was enough. One of the guards overheard him and the boy was tortured to death.
He was stripped naked and hung upside down from the gallows - he hung there for
three hours. He was strong and still very much alive. They took him down and lay
him on the ground and pushed sand down his throat with sticks until he died.
p 419
Near Auschwitz a new slave labour camp was opened on August 15 at Jawiszowice.
In it, one hundred and fifty Jews, sent from the barracks at Birkenau, were used in the
underground coal mines of the Hermann Goering Works. Later their number rose to
two thousand five hundred. A month earlier, three hundred Jews had been sent from
Birkenau to Goleszow, to work in the Portland Cement Factory. Here, too, the
numbers were to rise, to one thousand. On October 1, a third camp was opened at
Chelmek, in which Jews from the barracks at Birkenau spent over two months
clearing ponds needed to provide water to the Bata Shoe Factory in the town. In these
camps, and eventually in more than twenty others in the Auschwitz region, tens of
thousands of Jews died of the harsh conditions. Those who became too weak to work
were often returned to Birkenau, and gassed.
At Auschwitz, gassing was carried out by a commercial pesticide, Cyclon B. At
Belzec, Chelmno, Treblinka and Sobibor, the four death camps, Jews were killed by
the exhaust from diesel engines: carbon monoxide poisoning. At Treblinka, it was the
engines of captured Russian tanks and trucks which provided the exhaust. p 425
Gerstein and Professor Pfannenstiel stayed at Belzec village overnight, the guests of
the camp commandant, Christian Wirth. . . .
[Gerstein recalled] . . . SS men pushed the men into the chambers. “Fill it up,” Wirth
ordered. Seven to eight hundred people in ninety-three square metres. The doors
were closed. Then I understood the reason for the ‘Heckenholt’ sign. Heckenholt was
the driver of the diesel, whose exhaust was to kill these poor unfortunates. . . .
The diesel engine started up after two hours and forty-nine minutes by my
stopwatch. Twenty-five minutes passed. You could see through the window that
many were already dead, for an electric light illuminated the interior of the room. All
were dead after thirty-two minutes.
Jewish workers on the other side opened the wooden doors. They had been promised
their lives in return for doing this horrible work, plus a small percentage of the
money and valuables collected. The people were still standing like columns of stone,
with no room to fall or lean. Even in death you could tell the families, all holding
hands. It was difficult to separate them while emptying the room for the next batch.
The bodies were tossed out, blue, wet with sweat and urine, the legs smeared with
excrement and menstrual blood. Two dozen workers were busy checking mouths
which they opened with iron hooks. . . . Dentists knocked out gold teeth, bridges and
crowns with hammers.
Captain Wirth stood in the middle of them. He was in his element and, showing me a
big jam box filled with teeth, said, “See the weight of the gold! Just from yesterday
and the day before! You can't imagine what we find every day, dollars, diamonds,
gold! You'll see!” . . .
Then the bodies were thrown into big ditches near the gas-chambers, about 100 by
20 by 12 meters. After a few days, the bodies swelled. . . .
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When the swelling went down again, the bodies matted down again. They told me
later they poured diesel oil over the bodies and burned them on railway sleepers to
make them disappear.
Gerstein went on from Belzec to Treblinka, where, on August 21, he witnessed further
gassings. Then, on August 22, he took the express train back to Berlin. Also travelling
on the train was a Swedish diplomat, Baron von Otter. Less than an hour from
Warsaw, the train stopped in open country. “We both got down to get a breath of air,”
Otter later recalled. “I offered him a cigarette. He refused. There were beads of sweat
on his forehead. There were tears in his eyes. And his voice was hoarse when he said,
at once, ‘I saw something awful yesterday - can I come and see you at the Legation?’”
Otter suggested that they talk on the train. Gerstein agreed. “Is it the Jews?” Otter
asked. “Yes it is,” Gerstein replied. “I saw more than ten thousand die yesterday.”
pp 426-428
At Sarny, where fourteen
thousand Volhynian Jews were
assembled on August 28, two
Jews, one a carpenter with his
axe, the other, Josef Gendelman,
a tinsmith with his tin-cutters,
broke through the fence
surrounding the ghetto and led a
mass escape. Three thousand
Jews reached the gap in the
fence, and sought to push their
way through it. But the
Ukrainians were armed with
machine guns, and two and a half thousand Jews were shot down at the fence. Five
hundred escaped, but many of these were killed on their way to the woods, and only a
hundred survived the war and its two more years of privation, manhunts, and frequent
local hostility.
p 436
On September 2 it was the Jews of Dzialoszyce who were marked out for destruction.
On September 1 the Gestapo, together with Polish police and Ukrainians, surrounded
the town. Rosenblum’s account continued:
I have no words to describe the Nazi terror and brutality of that day. They were
shooting and burning! There was hell all around us! The horrible things that
happened exceeded all imagination. Who could have imagined such brutality and
cruelty by human beings. The barbarism of past centuries is pale against what
happened that day of deportation. People were shot in the houses, in the streets, in
the market square. There were dead Jews all over the town!
. . . . On September 2, that day after I had run away, the Jewish people were all
summoned to the market place in the early hours of the morning, with only a
minimum of their belongings.
They were kept waiting the whole day, men, women, children, the old, the sick, the
invalids, the Gestapo savagely beating and shooting them indiscriminately for no
reason. God could not have devised a worse torment in hell than that of standing and
waiting there in the market place beneath a blazing sun. Death would have been
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preferable to that. At last there came the signal to leave and they were marched to the
train station. . . .
In the valley, three large graves were already waiting for them. They had been dug
out that same day. The old, the sick, pregnant women and small children, two
thousand innocent Jewish souls, were shot and brutally thrown into those graves, one
on top of the other. Many of them were still alive! For most of the children they
didn’t even waste a bullet. They were just thrown in alive. And together wit those
who were only wounded, finished their lives under the pressure of the human mass. .
..
The larger grave contained a thousand bodies, and the two smaller graves contained
five hundred bodies each. We learned of this massacre from the Polish police
themselves. They told Moshe Hersh about it in minute detail, because they
themselves had taken part in that slaughter.
On the following Sunday, they went to church with their families, as if nothing had
happened. They suffered no guilt feelings. After all, they were only murdering Jews,
with the blessing of their priests, who inflamed them from their pulpits on Sundays.
One more act in the savage drama had yet to be performed:
Moshe Hersh then told us that the next day, at dawn, we must go up to the cemetery
and dig ditches around those mass graves, otherwise the water from the hills would
wash out the dead bodies, and they would be left exposed.
And so in the morning, with shovels in hand, we went up to the cemetery. God, O
God, what a sight! What we saw there! What a massacre! What a slaughter! I cannot
begin to describe that sight. Hundreds of bodies lay exposed, rotting and decaying.
The stench of those corpses was intolerable. We threw ourselves on to the graves.
We did not want to go on living any more!
Of the ten thousand Jews in Dialoszyce
on September 2, two thousand had been
slaughtered in the mass graves outside
the town. The remaining eight thousand
had been deported to Belzec and gassed.
The horrors of the massacres at
Dzialoszyce were repeated all over
Europe, and with them, many incidents
of heroism.
pp 443-446
In the House of Commons on September 8, Winston Churchill referred to the
deportations from France during the course of a comprehensive survey of the war
situation. The “brutal persecutions” in which the Germans had indulged, he said, “in
every land into which their armies have broken,” had recently been augmented by
“the most bestial, the most squalid and the most senseless of all their offences, namely
the mass deportation of Jews from France, with the pitiful horrors attendant upon the
calculated and final scattering of families.” Churchill added: “This tragedy fills me
with astonishment as well as with indignation, and it illustrates as nothing else can the
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utter degradation of the Nazi nature and theme, and the degradation of all who lend
themselves to its unnatural and perverted passions.”
pp 450-451
Neither compliance, nor resistance, could stop the juggernaut of death. At Birkenau
on September 5 about eight hundred Jewish women, too weak to work, almost too
weak to walk, were gassed. The gassing was watched by Dr Kremer, who described it
as “the most horrible of horrors.” Another SS doctor in the camp, Heinz Thilo,
commented to Kremer that day: “we are located here in ‘anus mundi,’” the ‘anus of
the world.’
Kremer was not to forget the
gassing of those eight hundred
women. “When I came to the
bunker,” he recalled five years
later, “they sat clothed on the
ground. As the clothes were in
fact worn out camp clothes, they
were not led into the undressing
barracks but undressed in the
open. I could deduce from the
behaviour of these women that
they realised what was awaiting
them. They begged the SS men to
be allowed to live, they wept, but all of them were driven to the gas-chamber and
gassed. Being an anatomist I had seen many horrors, had dealt with corpses, but what
I then saw was not to be compared with anything ever seen before.” . . . .
Kremer noted. “Men compete to take part on such actions as they get additional
rations – 200 ml. of vodka, 5 cigarettes, 100 grams of sausage and bread.” pp 452-453
Survival had been offered to those with work cards. But their children were not
intended to benefit. Samek, a father, decided to carry his two-year-old daughter
Miriam past the selection point in a knapsack. First, he gave her a sedative. Then,
with his wife, he joined the line. Alexander Donat has recorded the sequel, and the
fate, first, of another father and child, as Samek waited his turn:
The column advanced slowly, while up ahead the SS officer grandly dispensed life
and death, left and right, links und rechts. In the tense silence the wails of a baby
suddenly rose. The SS officer froze and a thousand men and women held their
breaths. A Ukrainian guard ran out, plunged his bayonet several times into the
knapsack from which the criminal sounds had come. In seconds the knapsack was a
blood-soaked rag. “Du dreckiger Schweinehund!” “You filthy pig-dog!” the SS
officer shouted indignantly, bringing his riding crop down on the ashen face of the
father who had dared to try smuggling his child past. Mercifully, the Ukrainian’s
bullet put an end to the father’s ordeal then and there. Thereafter it became routine
for guards to probe every bundle and knapsack with their bayonets.
p 454
Between September 6 and September 9, more than thirty thousand Jews were
deported from the Warsaw ghetto to Treblinka. On September 10 more than five
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thousand were deported, a further five thousand on September 11, and 4,806 on
September 12. The deportations then ceased for nine days.
p 455
Samuel Rajzman also gave testimony after the war of how the women, on arrival,
were “shaved to the skin,” their hair being later packed up for dispatch to Germany.
His account continued:
Because little children at their mothers’ breasts were a great nuisance during the
shaving procedure, later the system was modified and babies were taken from their
mothers as soon as they got off the train. The children were taken to an enormous
ditch; when a large number of them were gathered together they were killed by
firearms and thrown into the fire. Here, too, no one bothered to see whether all the
children were really dead. Sometimes one could hear infants wailing in the fire.
When mothers succeeded in keeping their babies with them and this fact interfered
with the shaving, a German guard took the baby by its legs and smashed it against
the wall of the barracks until only a bloody mass remained in his hands. The
unfortunate mother had to take this mass with her to the ‘bath.’ Only those who saw
these things with their own eyes will believe with what delight the Germans
performed these operations; how glad they were when they succeeded in killing a
child with only three or four blows; with what satisfaction they pushed the baby’s
corpse into the mother's arms.
The invalids, cripples and aged who could not move fast were put to death in the
same way as the children. The ditch in which the children and infirm were
slaughtered and burned was called in German the ‘Lazarett,’ ‘infirmary,’ and the
workers employed in it wore armbands with the Red Cross sign.
p 457
25 September - November 1942: The spread of resistance
From the first days of the war, the destruction of Jewish life in German-occupied
Europe had been paralleled by the acquisition of Jewish property. Killing and looting
had gone hand in hand. Nor was this the spontaneous looting of armies and soldiers,
but the deliberate and systematic search for every type of wealth that could be seized
or sequestered. Shops, businesses and factories had been taken first, transferred
without recompense to local ethnic Germans or to the German war machine. Furs,
jewellery, radios, even pets had been taken next. Almost every week notices were
posted up in cities and ghettos announcing some new confiscation. At the end of the
path of this deliberate impoverishment of a whole people came the looting of their last
meager possessions, their bundles, the clothes they were wearing, even their hair, at
the edge of the death pit or on the final approach to the gas-chamber. Nor was that the
very end: even from the corpses the last ounce of a gold tooth had to be extracted.
Under the Nazi system, murder had become as profitable as commerce; even more so,
for there had been nothing to pay, no bargain to strike, only the point of a gun and the
lash of a whip, and the wealth and possessions of many generations lay in the palm of
the conqueror.
pp 468-469
Among the largest of the Jewish communities destroyed in October 1942 was the
community of Piotrkow, where fifteen thousand Jews had lived on the eve of the war.
Of these, two thousand had managed to escape eastwards to the Soviet Union in the
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first weeks of war. Those who had remained inside the cramped confines of their
ghetto were forced to take in a further eight thousand Jews from the neighbouring
towns and villages. At two in the morning of October 14 the Piotrkow ‘action’ began.
It was to last for eight days. About a thousand Jews, including many who were too
sick to leave their hospital beds, were shot. Also shot in his bed was the baker Yehuda
Leib Russak, who refused to abandon his paralysed wife. She too was shot.
More than twenty thousand Jews were
deported from Piotrkow. All were sent to
Treblinka, and gassed. The convert Dr
Shanster, the Turkish subject Jacob
Witorz and his family, and the Egyptian
subject Kem, and his family, those Jews
who had originally been allowed to stay
out of the ghetto, were deported with the
rest. So too, in the last train, was Rabbi
Lau, who, on the eve if his departure,
gave a sermon on the theme of Kiddush
Ha-Shem, the sanctification of God’s name through martyrdom. A witness of the
sermon later related that Rabbi Lau spoke “with as much pathos and enthusiasm as he
used to do in the good old days, from the pulpit of the synagogue.” Lau told the Jews
around him: “Better a living death than a dead life. Everyone killed as a Jew is a
saint.”
Although Lau had earlier received an offer to escape back to his home town of
Slovakia, he had declined, calling now upon the Jews of Piotrkow “to fulfill the will
of God with joy.” He was then deported to his death.
pp 481-482
News had begun to reach the West that the Jews deported ‘to the East’ were being
murdered by gas. Most of this news reached neutral Switzerland from Germany, and
was passed on at once to London, Washington and Jerusalem. These reports soon
found an echo in the speeches and declarations of Allied statesmen. On October 29 a
protest meeting was held in London, under the chairmanship of the Archbishop of
Canterbury. Winston Churchill wrote to the Archbishop, for those at the meeting:
“The systematic cruelties to which the Jewish people - men, women and children have been exposed under the Nazi regime are amongst the most terrible events in
history, and place an indelible stain upon all who perpetrate and instigate them. Free
men and women denounce these vile crimes, and when this world struggle ends with
the enthronement of human rights, racial persecution will be ended.”
p 485
‘To save at least someone’
The deportations within German-occupied Poland [by November 1942] were almost
over: 600,000 Polish Jews had been gassed in Belzec, 360,000 in Chelmno, 250,000
in Sobibor. Treblinka, where 840,000 were gassed, still awaited the German decision
about the surviving 50,000 Jews of Warsaw.
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Now it was in the forests and labour camps that the killings began. Throughout the
winter, Polish peasants took part in raids organized by the Germans to track down
Jews in hiding. “The peasants,” noted Zygmunt Klukowski in his diary on November
26, “for fear of repressive measures, catch Jews in the villages and bring them into the
town, or sometimes simply kill them on the spot.” Klukowsky added:
“Generally, a strange brutalization has taken place regarding the Jews. People have
fallen into a kind of psychosis: following the German example, they often do not see
in the Jew a human being but instead consider him as a kind of obnoxious animal that
must be annihilated with every possible means, like rabid dogs, rats, etc.” pp 502-503
The deportations to Chelmno, Belzec and Sobibor had
almost ended, the majority of Poland’s pre-war Jewish
communities having been deported and gassed during
1942. It was Birkenau that had become the focal point
of mass murder of the Jews from the rest of Germanoccupied Europe. On 2 November 1942 the head of the
Ancestral Heritage Institute in Germany, Dr Soevers,
wrote to Dr Karl Brandt, asking for 150 skeletons of
Jews. “We have the opportunity,” Dr Sievers had
explained earlier, “of obtaining real scientific evidence
by obtaining the skulls of Jewish Bolshevik
commissars, who are the exemplification of the subhuman type, the revolting but typical sub-human type.”
Each head, Dr Sievers explained, must be detached
from its body, dipped in preservative liquid, and put in a specially prepared
hermetically sealed tin.
The corpses were duly provided. Seven months later Eichmann was informed that 115
people had been killed for their skeletons: seventy-nine Jews, thirty Jewesses, four
central Asians and two Poles. In this way, mass murder was made to serve the cause
of one of the most bizarre, and obscene, forms of ‘science.’
p 515
One of those who recorded some of the events at Birkenau was a member of the
Sonderkommando whose twenty-nine-page notebook was found in 1952 buried near
one of the crematoria. He recorded how, at the beginning of 1943:
The gas-chamber was crowded with Jews and one Jewish boy remained outside. A
certain sergeant came to him and wanted to kill him with a stick. He mangled him in
a brutish manner, blood was dripping on all sides, when all of a sudden the
maltreated boy, who had been lying motionless, jumped to his feet and began to
regard, quietly and silently, his cruel murderer with his childish gaze. The sergeant
burst into loud cynical laughter, took out his revolver and shot the boy.
The author of this notebook also recorded how another of the SS men at Birkenau, SS
Staff Sergeant Forst, “stood at the gate of the undressing room in the case of many
transports and felt the sexual organ of each woman that was passing naked to the gaschamber. There were also cases when German SS men of all ranks put fingers into the
sexual organs of pretty young girls.”
p 518
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‘Help me get more trains’
On February 6, Himmler received a report on the “quantity of old garments” collected
from Birkenau and the camps in the Lublin region. The list included 97,000 sets of
men’s “old clothing,” 76,000 sets of women’s “old clothing,” 132,000 men’s shirts,
155,000 women’s coats and 3,000 kilograms of women’s hair. The women’s hair
filled a whole freight car. . . .
The Jewish clothing sent to the Reich filled 825 freight cars. In addition, the amount
of foreign currency, gold and silver listed was considerable, including half a million
United States dollars, and 116,420 dollars in gold.
Clothes, valuables, hair: these were among the spoils of the German war against the
Jews. Children and their parents were actually stripped of their pathetic possessions at
the entrance to the gas-chamber.
pp 539-540
In Italy Mussolini continued to reject all appeals for the deportation of Jews. On
February 22, the day of the Thrace and Macedonia deportation agreement with
Bulgaria, the German government learned that the Italian military authorities in Lyons
had forced the French police chief in the city to annul an order for the arrest of several
hundred Jews who were to have been sent to Auschwitz “for labour service.” Three
days later, Ribbentrop complained personally to Mussolini that “Italian military
circles, and sometimes the German army itself, lacked a proper understanding of the
Jewish question.”
p 543
Himmler also visited Sobibor at this
time. According to an eye-witness, three
hundred young Jewish women, the
prettiest that could be found, had been
selected on that occasion in Majdanek,
and brought specially to Sobibor, where
Himmler had watched them, naked,
being gassed. Several survivors also
recalled how SS Staff Sergeant Hubert
Gomerski and another SS man used to
amuse themselves by swinging Jewish
children by their legs and then flinging
them to their deaths. He who threw a Jewish child farthest won. Eye-witnesses also
described how Gomerski would walk past the lines of Jews as they left the cattle
trucks and kill those who appeared too weak to be able to walk to the gas-chambers
by smashing their skulls with a heavy iron watering can.
p 546
Also lucky were forty-eight thousand Jews of Bulgaria: those living within the prewar borders of the state. At first, it seemed that they too would be deported, as had
those from the Bulgarian-occupied zones of Thrace and Macedonia. Following
German insistence, the Bulgarian government had indeed ordered the deportation of
all Jews from Bulgaria proper, some of whom had already been interned. But the
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deportation order led to such an outcry from the Bulgarian people, including many
intellectuals and church leaders, that the government rescinded the order, and Jews
already taken into custody were released.
In the northern part of Bulgaria, farmers had threatened to lie down on the railway
tracks to prevent passage of the deportation trains. It was also said that the King
himself had intervened. Despite the fact that he was German, of the family of Coburg,
he was known to be opposed to the anti-Semitic measures then in force in Bulgaria,
helpless though he considered himself to be in the face of the German might. The
release of the Jews, which took place on March 10, came to be known in Bulgaria as
the “miracle of the Jewish people.”
p 547
The Bulgarian experience highlights the possibility that was open to certain states in
Europe to refuse to allow their Jewish citizens to be deported. There were several
other occasions on which this refusal was exercised. By March 1943, Finland, Italy
and Hungary had each likewise chosen to refuse, and had refused successfully, the
German government’s demands to deport Jews to Germany. Slovakia and Vichy
France, however, had complied with the German demands, and had done so with
alacrity, as had Vidkun Quisling’s government in Norway. Those countries whose
governments agreed to deport Jews also put their local police forces at the disposal of
the Germans in the work of rounding up Jews.
p 548
Each act of escape or resistance still led
to immediate and massive reprisals. On
March 16, in Lvov, a Jew, Engineer
Kotnowski, killed an SS policeman who
was noted for his cruelty. The next day,
as a reprisal, the Germans burst into the
ghetto and hanged eleven Jewish
policemen from the balconies in the main
street of the ghetto. That same day more
than a thousand Jews were taken out of
the working groups and shot, while in
Janowska camp, nearly two hundred Jews were killed: a reprisal ratio of almost
twelve hundred to one.
pp 551-552
Warsaw, April 1943: hopeless days of revolt
The Germans entered the Warsaw ghetto on the morning of April 19. Man for man
and gun for gun, their forces were formidable: 2,100 German soldiers, including SS
troops, against 1,200 Jewish fighters; 13 heavy machine guns, against which the Jews
had no equivalent armament; 69 hand-held machine guns, against which the Jews had
none; a total of 135 submachine guns, against which the Jews had 2; several howitzers
and other artillery pieces, of which the Jews had none; a total of 1,358 rifles, as
against only 17 rifles among the Jews. The Jews had acquired some pistols, about five
hundred. But pistols were of little or no use in street fighting. The main Jewish
weapons were several thousand grenades and incendiary bottles.
pp557-558
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During April 20 the Germans broke into the Czyste hospital on Gesia Street where, as
Najberg noted, “They shot all the sick lying on beds.” Among those killed was Michal
Gluski, the editor, before the war, of the monthly Foreign Languages Echo. “That
talented man,” Najberg wrote, “found his tragic death on a hospital bed.” Alexander
Donat later recalled: “German soldiers went through the wards shooting and killing all
whom they found. Then they set the building on fire. Those patients and staff who had
managed to reach the cellars, died in the fire.”
The Germans moved through the ghetto, shelling the buildings from which shots were
fired at them, and burning down the apartment blocks, building by building. Several
hundred Jews were forced by the smoke and flames to jump from the blazing
buildings, and to their deaths.
p 560
Despite being outnumbered and out armed, the Jewish fighters continued to engage
the German forces. On April 23 Mordecai Anielewicz wrote to Yitzhak Zuckerman,
who was seeking help for the uprising on the ‘Aryan’ side: “You should know that the
pistol is of no use. We hardly made use of it. What we need is grenades, rifles,
machine guns and explosives.” Anielewicz wrote also of the “victory” that only a
single man from his fighting units was missing. His letter ended: “Keep well. Perhaps
we'll still see each other. What’s most important; the dream of my life has become a
reality. I lived to see Jewish defence in the ghetto in all its greatness and splendour.”
p 561
On April 26 the German commander, SS Brigadier General Stroop, reported that the
continuing resistance in the bunkers and underground shelters had been “broken,
either by returning fire or by blowing up the bunkers.” As the buildings of the ghetto
were set on fire, and thousands of unarmed Jews were rounded up and marched to the
Umschlagplatz, the battle in the bunkers continued; even the roofs and upper floors of
unburned houses gave shelter to Jews with guns.
p 561
By the end of the first week of May the last main focus of Jewish resistance in the
Warsaw ghetto was a bunker at 18 Mila Street, in which 120 fighters were gathered.
This too was attacked by the Germans, on May 8. For two hours the entrance was
bombarded, but in vain. Then the Germans began to send gas into the bunker. . . .
Among the hundred Jewish fighters who were killed in the battle for the bunker under
18 Mila Streeet was Mordechai Anielewicz, “our handsome commander,” Zivia
Lubetkin wrote, “whom we all loved.” “We fought back,” she later reflected, “and it
made our lot easier and made it easier to die.” Also killed was Berl Broyde, a leading
member of the Jewish Fighting Organization, who, deported to Treblinka in January
1943, had managed to jump from the train and return to the ghetto.
The Germans combed the ghetto for any surviving Jews. In all, according to Jurgen
Stroop’s calculations, 7,000 Jews had been killed in the fighting, and 30,000 had been
deported to Treblinka. Five to six hundred Jews, he added, “were destroyed by being
blown up or by perishing in the flames.” A total of 631 bunkers had been destroyed.
pp 564-565
On May 16 Jurgen Stroop reported to his superiors that the Warsaw ghetto “is no
longer in existence.” The “large-scale action” had ended at 8.15 that evening “by
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blowing up the Warsaw synagogue.” Systematically, street by street, the buildings of
the ghetto were now destroyed. But small groups of Jews continued to live in the
bunkers, and to fight. Leon Najberg was still in hiding on May 19: he and forty-four
others, still undetected in what they called their ‘den.’
pp 565-566
Two weeks later, on June 3, the Germans
destroyed a bunker on Walowa Street
containing 150 people. “Those living in
the shelters,” Leon Najberg later
recalled, “became harrowingly thin and
looked like skeletons. After six weeks in
these graves, they looked like ghosts
frightened of living.”
Najberg’s group lived on among the
ruins. But starvation, exhaustion and
sickness took their toll. Only four of
them were still alive by September 1943, when they managed to cross into ‘Aryan’
Warsaw.
p 567
‘The crashing fires of hell’
On April 30, two thousand Jews were deported from Wlodawa to Sobibor. On arrival
at the unloading camp, they attacked the SS guard with bare hands and pieces of wood
torn from the wagons. All of them were killed by grenades and machine-gun fire.
p 575
The medical experiments at Auschwitz were veiled in secrecy. . . .
The first experiments, intended to
provide evidence about the effects and
consequences of sterilization, were
carried out on a number of young Jewish
girls between the ages of fifteen and
eighteen. All were from Greece. First,
they were sterilized by X-rays. Then
their ovaries were removed. Or, three
months after the sterilization, parts of
their reproductive organs would be
removed and sent to the Research
Institute in Breslau. Such experiments
were performed two to three times a
week. Each experiment would ‘use up’
about thirty women. Hundreds of
women, having been mutilated by these
experiments, were then sent to Birkenau
and to its gas-chambers.
p 577
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From the moment of his arrival at Auschwitz, Mengele joined the other SS officers
and SS doctors, among them Dr Clauberg, and later Dr Kremer, in the ‘selection’ of
Jews reaching the railway junction from all over Europe, with a movement of the
hand or the wave of a stick indicating as ‘unfit for work,’ and thus destined for
immediate death in the gas-chambers all children, old people, sick, crippled and weak
Jews, and all pregnant women.
Between May 1943 and November 1944 Mengele took part in at least seventy-four
such selections. He also took an equally decisive part in at least thirty-one selections
in the camp infirmary, pointing out for death by shooting, injection or gassing Jews
whose strength had been sapped by hunger, forced labour, untreated illness or illtreatment by the guards.
p 582
One of the few people to speak to Mengele in Auschwitz about his attitude to the Jews
was a Christian woman, Dr Ella Lingens. She had been deported to Auschwitz from
Vienna three months before Mengele’s own arrival in the camp, having been
denounced for sheltering Jews, and for helping them escape across the Austrian
border into Switzerland. She later recalled how, in Auschwitz, “I was in a triply
privileged position, as a German, as a non-Jew and as a doctor.” During one of his
conversations with her, Mengele “said that there were only two gifted nations in the
world - the Germans and the Jews.” “The question is,” he asked her, “which one will
dominate?”
p 582
Since early 1943, the advance of the red
Army on the eastern front had led to the
decision to dig up the corpses of
hundreds of thousands of murdered
Jews, and to burn them. A former
Einsatzkommando chief, SS Colonel
Paul Blobel, was appointed to supervise
this task. The units operating under
Blobel’s command were known as the
“Blobel Commando” or “Special
Commando 1005.”
One large-scale Blobel ‘action’, began
on June 15, at the Janowska death pits in
Lvov, when hundreds of Jewish forced labourers in Janowska were taken to the
nearby mass murder site and forced to dig up putrefying corpses. They were ordered
to extract gold teeth and pull gold rings off the fingers of the dead. “Every day,”
recalled Leon Weliczker, a survivor of the first of the Blobel ‘actions,’ “we collected
about eight kilograms of gold.”
pp 584-585
‘To perish, but with honour’
On July 25, Mussolini was deposed as ruler of Italy. Although he had not allowed
Jews under Italian rule to be deported to Germany, his downfall was greeted by Jews
under Nazi rule with rejoicing. The end had come for one of Hitler’s allies. In
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Janowska camp, in Lvov, a Gestapo man accused a young Jew who crossed his path
of greeting him with veiled mockery, in celebration of Mussolini’s downfall. The
youth was sentenced to death. Two SS men carried out the execution: “They hung the
youth upside down,” the historian Philip Friedman has recorded, “cut off his male
organ, and placed it in his mouth, and kicked him ceaselessly in the stomach to make
the blood flow to his head. The youth died in terrible agony.”
pp 595-596
The children deported from Bialystok were taken first to Theresienstadt, where their
arrival was noted with concern by the tens of thousands of German, Austrian and
Czech Jews being held there. “A train arrives at the ghetto,” recalled Josef Polak,
“bringing nearly thirteen hundred children aged from six to fifteen years. Nobody is
allowed out in the streets, nobody is allowed to talk to the children. Closely guarded
by the sentries and the SS, the children walk in a straggling procession, barefoot or in
old boots, clad in rags, dirty, nothing but bags of skin and bone, to the delousing
station.” Polak added: “They are terrified, none of them utters a word, none of them
smiles, but when they see the noticeboard with the word ‘gas’ before the delousing
station, they cling to each other, begin to cry, and refuse to enter. They evidently have
some experience with gas from the East. But finally they are all bathed and furtively
and in secret they tell some of the members of the disinfection group of their fate. At
Bialystok the SS ‘Death Commando’ has shot their mothers and fathers before their
eyes.”
adults who had volunteered to accompany them.
While in Theresienstadt, the
Bialystok children were lodged in
houses surrounded by barbed
wire, and “several score,” as
Polak noted, died of disease.
Those who were taken ill, he
added, were taken to the Small
Fortress section of the ghetto by
the SS men “and beaten to
death.” Four weeks later, the
surviving children were deported
again, this time to Birkenau,
where all of them were murdered,
together with the fifty-three
p 601
The last Jews to reach Treblinka, on August 18, had been Jews from Bialystok. All
were gassed. Four days later, a wagon laden with the clothing of the dead left
Treblinka for Germany. The camp was ready to be closed down. Parts of demolished
huts, large numbers of wooden planks, and quantities of chlorinated lime were taken
away, followed by the excavator.
The Jews who were made to dismantle the camp realized that once their work was
done they too would be killed. But within the camp, they were always outnumbered
by the armed guards. On September 2, however, a group of thirteen Jews killed their
Ukrainian SS guard with a crowbar while working just outside the camp wire. The
leader, an eighteen-year-old Polish Jew, Seweryn Klajnman from Falenica, put on the
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dead man’s uniform, took his rifle, and “marched off” his fellow prisoners as if to a
new work detail further off, cursing and bellowing at them as they went, as befitted an
SS guard. Guided by one of their number, Shlomo Mokka, a carter and horse-trader
from Wegrow who knew the area well, they escaped their pursuers and evaded
capture.
Later in September the gas-chambers at Treblinka were demolished and the barbedwire fencing was removed. Then the remaining Jews who had carried out these tasks
were deported to Sobibor. The shunting-engines and the armoured cars were then sent
elsewhere; and the SS men were transferred to other camps. In all, a hundred goods
wagons full of equipment had been seen to leave. Treblinka was no more.
The last of the camp personnel to leave Treblinka for other camps were the Ukrainian
guards. Then the site of the killings was ploughed up, a house and farm buildings
were built, seed was sown, and Strebel, a German from the Ukraine, himself a former
member of the camp staff, moved into the farm, bringing his family to join him from
the Ukraine. They were the first true ‘settlers,’ in a camp where the overriding
deception had been that it was for ‘resettlement.’
pp 602-603
The reality of extermination was so terrible that the civilised mind of man rebelled
against it. “Persistent rumours circulate,” wrote Jakub Poznanski, in the Lodz ghetto,
on 27 September 1943, “about the liquidation of the ghettos in various Polish cities. In
my opinion, people are exaggerating, as usual. Even if certain excesses have taken
place in some cities, that still does not incline one to believe that Jews are being massmurdered. At least I consider that out of the question.”
Poznans’s doubts were a sign of the isolation of one ghetto from another. So little was
known by the Jews in any one locality of the fate of Jews elsewhere. In the labour
camp at Nowogrodek, the two hundred and fifty survivors of the once flourishing
Jewish population of five thousand had no idea of the events that had to recently taken
place in Vilna, or in Bialystok. All they knew was that their destruction could be
ordered at any moment.
p 608
With the destruction of each ghetto, the Germans continued to gather the clothing and
belongings of the dead. On September 6 the Lodz Ghetto Chronicle noted a further
“twelve freight cars” of used shoes reaching the ghetto. “The old shoe-shop,” it added,
“will be busy for many months just sorting this vast quantity.” Leather shoes had to be
sorted from other shoes. Men’s, women’s and children’s shoes had to be separated.
Right shoes had to be sorted from left shoes, “whole shoes from half shoes,” black
shoes from brown shoes, and finally “and this is the hardest job of all,” the matching
pairs “have to be ferreted out.”
The penalty for any theft from this mass of shoe leather brought into the ghetto was
execution. In each of the ghetto factories a notice stated: “Every act of theft will be
punishable by death.” Icek Bekerman, a thirty-four-year-old shoeworker, had already
been hanged in the Lodz ghetto in September 13, for taking a few scraps of leather in
order to make himself a pair of shoe laces. The ghetto carpentry shop had been
ordered to build the gallows, and the entire personnel of the leather and saddlery
workshop, and the shoe workshop, were ordered to be present at the execution,
together with representatives of each of the other workshops in the ghetto.
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Bekerman’s wife and two children were not allowed to the place of execution to
witness the death sentence. Instead, forced to remain at home, their cries could be
heard by all those on the way to the execution. Those cries, recalled the twelve-yearold Ben Edelbaum, “were the most terrifying lamentations I had ever heard.” p 610
‘A page of glory . . . never to be written’
Courage could be shown in every conceivable circumstance of horror. Every day,
Jewish girls who had been selected for the barracks at Birkenau were driven, starving,
beaten and naked, to the bath-house. As they were pushed along, SS men and SS
women, as a Jewish girl from Poland, Kitty Hart, has recalled, “sniggering and idly
flicking their whips,” watched them pass. On one such occasion, Kitty Hart recalled, a
Jewish girl “deliberately scraped a handful of lice from her body and flung them in
the face of a guard who had come too close. She died immediately; but after than the
SS were even more careful to keep their distance.”
“She died immediately.” We do not know her name, nor from what country she came;
only that she was a Jewess whose spirit no surfeit of torment had been able to destroy.
p 626
‘Do not think our spirit is broken’
On November 17, [1943] of 995 Jews brought to Birkenau from Holland, 531 were
taken to be gassed, among them 166 children. At the same time, 164 Poles were
brought to the gas-chamber, twelve of these being young women from a Polish
underground group. The member of the Sonderkommando whose manuscript was
among those discovered after the war, recorded:
A certain young Polish woman made a very short but fiery speech in the gaschamber, addressing all who were present, stripped to their skins. She condemned
the Nazi crimes and oppression and ended with the words, “We shall not die now,
the history of our nation shall immortalize us, our initiative and our spirit are alive
and flourishing, the German nation shall as dearly pay for our blood as we possibly
can imagine, down with savagery in the guise of Hitler’s Germany! Long live
Poland!”
Then she turned to the Jews from the Sonderkommando, “Remember that it is
incumbent on you to follow your sacred duty of revenging us, the guiltless. Tell our
brothers, our nation, that we went to meet our death in full consciousness and with
pride.”
Then the Poles knelt on the ground and solemnly said a certain prayer, in a posture
that made an immense impression, then they rose and all together in chorus sang the
Polish anthem, the Jews sang the ‘Hatikvah.’
The cruel common fate in this accursed spot merged the lyric tones of these diverse
anthems into one whole. They expressed in this way their last feelings with a deeply
moving warmth and their hope for, and belief in, the future of their nation. Then they
sang the ‘Intrernationale.’
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At that moment the vans arrived, marked
deceptively and mockingly with the
symbol of the Red Cross. The tins of gas
pellets were taken from the van, and gas
was thrown into the chamber. All
perished, “amidst singing and ecstasy,
dreaming of uniting the world with
bonds of brotherhood and of its
betterment.”
pp 636-637
At Borki the three hundred Jews were
ordered to dig. “I was digging with my
spade,” Reznik [a former Jewish soldier
in the Polish army before the German
occupation] later recalled, “and after removing two or three spadefuls of earth, I felt
the spade hit something hard and then I saw it was the head of a human being.”
More than thirty thousand bodies were dug up at Borki, in eight long trenches. All
were burned. Then the bones were ground to a powder in a special machine, and taken
away in sacks: thirty sacks a day. Most of the corpses were Red Army men, taken
prisoner by the Germans in the autumn and winter of 1941; all had been murdered.
Some were Italian soldiers, killed after Italy had abandoned the German cause, and
they had become prisoners-of-war. Others were Jews, among them children from
Hrubieszow.
Even as the graves were being uncovered, new corpses were brought and thrown into
them. “One of the graves would remain open all the time for new corpses,” Josef
Reznik recalled. “The new corpses would be coming all the time, continuously. A
truck would bring warm bodies, which would be thrown into the graves. They were
naked like Adam and Eve.” Reznik also recalled how, when one of the mass graves
was opened, “we saw a boy of two or three, lying on his mother’s body. He had little
white shoes on, and a white little jacket. His face was pressed against his mother’s,
and we were touched and moved, because we ourselves had children of our own.”
After the graves had been emptied, disinfected, and filled with earth, grass was
planted over them. The bodies had meanwhile been placed on massive pyres, a
thousand on each pyre. “There were two pyres of bodies going all the time,” Reznik
recalled, “and they burnt for two or three days, each heap of the dead.” Today, a small
memorial plaque marks the site.
pp 639-640
‘One should like so much to live a little bit longer’
The opening months of 1944 saw no pause in the search for victims, or in the cruelties
of the slaughter. . . .Of the fate of the women who had been brought to Block 25 that
Christmas, Madame Vaillant Coutourier recalled how uncovered trucks were driven
up to the block, and then:
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On them the naked women were piled, as many as the trucks could hold. Each time a
truck started, the famous Hessler ran after the truck and with his bludgeon repeatedly
struck the naked women going to their death.
They knew they were going to the gas-chamber and tried to escape. They were
massacred. They attempted to jump from the truck and we, from our own block,
watched the trucks pass by and heard the grievous wailing of all those women who
knew they were going to be gassed.
Perhaps it was these same women whom Rudolf Vrba saw being put on open lorries
to be taken to one of the gas-chambers.
p 648
Among the most remarkable documents to have survived the war is the manuscript
written in Birkenau by one of the members of the Sonderkommando, Salmen
Lewental. This particular manuscript was discovered in 1962 in a jar buried in the
ground near Crematorium III, where Lewental worked. The gaps in it are words
destroyed by dampness which seeped into the jar. Lewental, who did not survive his
gruesome work, recalled in his notebook what may have been the same episode
witnessed in its opening stages by Madame Vaillant Coutourier and Rudolf Vrba.
Lewental's account is headed “3,000 naked people.” It reads:
This was at the beginning of 1944. A cold, dry lashing wind was blowing. The soil
was quite frozen. The first lorry, loaded brimful with naked women and girls, drove in
front of Crematorium III. They were not standing close to one another, as usual, no;
they did not stand on their feet at all, they were exhausted, they lay inertly one upon
another in a state of utter exhaustion. They were sighing and groaning.
The lorry stopped, the tarpaulin was raised and they began to dump down the human
mass in the way in which gravel is unloaded on to the road. Those that had lain at the
edge, fell upon hard ground, breaking their heads open [. . .] so that they weakened
completely and had no strength left to move. The remaining [women] fell upon them,
pressing them down with their weight. One heard [ . . .] groans. . . .
. . .They were lined outside the block and later they were led to Block 25, where they
were ordered to strip naked; [allegedly] they were to be examined as to their health.
When they had stripped, all were driven to three blocks; one thousand persons in a
block and there they were shut for three days and three nights, without getting a drop
of water or a crumb of bread, even.
So they had lived for three awful days and it was only the third night that bread was
brought; one loaf of bread weighing 1.4 kilograms for sixteen persons, afterwards . . .
If they had shot us then, gassed us, it would have been better. Many [women] lost
consciousness and others were only semi-conscious. They lay crowded on bunks,
motionless, helpless. Death would not have impressed them at all then. . . .
One of us, standing aside and looking at the immensity of unhappiness of those
defenceless, tormented souls, could not master his feelings and wept.
One young girl then cried, “Look, what I have lived yet to see before my death: a look
of compassion and tears shed because of our dreadful fate. Here, in the murderers’
camp, where they torture and beat and where they torment, where one sees murders
and falling victims, here where men have lost the consciousness of the greatest
disasters, here where a brother or sister falls down in your sight, you cannot even
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vouchsafe them a [farewell] sigh, a man is still found who took to heart our horrible
disaster and who expressed his sympathy with tears. Ah, this is wonderful, not natural.
The tears and sighs of a living [man] will accompany us to our death, there is still
somebody who will weep for us. And I thought we shall pass away like deserted
orphans. The young man has given me some solace. Amidst only bandits and
murderers I have seen, before my death, a man who still feels.”
She turned to the wall, propped her head against it and sobbed quietly, pathetically.
She was deeply moved. Many girls stood and sat around, their heads bowed, and
preserved a stubborn silence, looked with deep revulsion at this base world and
particularly at us.
One of them spoke, “I am still so young, I have really not experienced anything in
my life, why should death of this kind fall to my lot? Why?” She spoke very slowly
in a faltering voice. She sighed heavily and proceeded, “And one should like so
much to live a little bit longer.”
pp 648-652
At Birkenau, one group of deportees had not only been kept alive, but whole families
had been kept together in a special family camp. These were some 3,860 Czech Jews,
survivors of the 5,000 Jews who had been brought to Birkenau from Theresienstadt
six months earlier. At the beginning of March they were visited by a German Red
Cross delegation, which was not allowed to see the rest of Birkenau. Then, on March
3, the inmates of the family camp were told to write postcards to their relatives who
were still in Czechoslovakia, saying that they were alive, well, and working. They
were also made to date the postcards March 25, 26, or 27, and to ask their relatives to
send them food parcels.
Four days later, the 3,680 “Czech family camp” inmates were told they were to be
resettled at a nearby labour camp, Heydebreck. No such ‘resettlement’ was in fact
planned. All 3,860 were to be sent to the gas-chambers only a few hundred yards
away from their ‘haven.’ . . .
Themselves deceived, these victims of a wider deception were driven into the
undressing room of the gas-chamber. Realising suddenly that they really were about
to be gassed, they tried to resist, attacking the guards with their bare hands. The SS
were quick to answer back, first with rifle butts and then, when the resistance spread,
with flame-throwers. Filip Muller, a member of the Sonderkommando at Birkenau,
and one of the few men to survive it, was then on duty in the dressing room. He later
recalled how these Czech family camp victims, “heads smashed and bleeding from
their wounds,” were driven across the threshold of the gas-chamber. As the gas pellets
were released, they began to sing the Czech national anthem, “Kde domov muj,”
“Where is My Home,” and the Hebrew song “Hatikvah,” “Hope.”
Of this whole Jewish group of 3,680 men, women and children, only thirty-seven
were spared, among them eleven pairs of twins, who were kept alive so that medical
experiments could be performed on them by Dr Mengele.
pp 657-659
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From the occupation of Hungary to the Normandy landings
On 10 March 1944 Adolf Eichmann and his principal subordinates met at Mauthausen
concentration camp in order to work out a deportation programme for the 750,000
Jews of Hungary. Eight days later, on March 18, Hitler again summoned the
Hungarian Regent, Admiral Horthy, to Klessheim Castle, near Salzburg. Horthy
agreed to deliver 100,000 “Jewish workers” for the German war effort, but he was
still reluctant to agree to a general deportation. At 9.30 that evening his train left
Salzburg for Budapest. Forty-five minutes later, German troops began to move into
Hungary.
p 662
A specially built railway spur now brought the trains to the very gates of two of the
gas-chambers, only a few yards’ walk away. “When we arrived in Birkenau,” one
eye-witness wrote four months later, “such a smell of burning flesh wafted towards us
that in the groups arriving at night, who not only smelt the stench but saw the flames
rising from the crematoria, many committed suicide at once.”
A Jewess from Hungary, Judith Sternberg, later recalled the moment of arrival at
Birkenau:
Corpses were strewn all over the road; bodies were hanging from the barbed-wire
fence; the sound of shots rang in the air continuously. Blazing flames shot into the
sky; a giant smoke cloud ascended above them. Starving, emaciated human skeletons
stumbled toward us, uttering incoherent sounds. They fell down right in front of our
eyes, and lay there gasping out their last breath.
With each arriving train from Hungary,
selections were made, some men and
women from each train were sent to the
barracks. But within a few days, twelve
thousand Jews were being gassed and
cremated every twenty-four hours.
pp 674-675
One eye-witness of the arrival of
Hungarian Jews at Birkenau was a
German soldier whose account was
eventually passed on to British military
intelligence. He was a member of the German anti-tank artillery unit, transferred from
the Russian front to the west. During the journey, the train on which he and his unit
were being transferred had to stop for a few days owing to “jammed railways.” At the
place where it stopped, it was shunted on to a side track. The side track was at
Auschwitz junction, at the entrance to the spur line into Birkenau.
On the siding, alongside the soldiers’ train, stood a goods train. Its tiny upper
windows were covered with barbed wire. The train was guarded by the SS.
The soldier’s account, as sent to London, read:
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This train was full of Hungarian Jews brought up for extermination. Nobody was
allowed near the train, but some of the soldiers managed to get near all the same, and
caught glimpses of what was going on.
The Jews were packed together in the carriages, men, women, children, old people;
they were not allowed out and had to obey the calls of nature inside. The carriages
were full of excrements, and a putrid fluid was trickling from the carriages.
The captives cried out for water but it was forbidden to bring them any. Some of the
soldiers did it all the same, in spite of the SS guards’ threats. The Jews offered them
valuables, rings, watches, etc., in return, but the soldiers refused. . . .
When night fell after the emptying of the death train, the chimneys began to smoke
and the smell of burned flesh filled the air. Also open fires were seen - the corpses
being burned on pyres because the crematorium could not deal with the masses of
victims. Another crematorium, bigger than the first, was seen under construction
nearby. The soldiers - the whole unit witnessed the events - were aghast. They had
heard of these things before but could not believe them. They stayed up all night and
discussed what they had seen. Even the most diehard Nazis were silent and pale. No
action was possible; the guns had been sent ahead, they had next to no arms, and the
place was full of SS.
The following day, six carriages rolled out of the death camp and were put on the side
track for the night. The soldiers crept into the carriages to inspect the contents. It
consisted of the clothes of the Jews murdered on the previous day - all with labels of
Hungarian firms - anything from shorts to shirts, men’s and women’s underwear, to
babies’ swaddling clothes, shoes, suits, dresses, etc., all addressed to
Textilverwaltung, Litzmannstadt (the German Textile Administration in Lodz), which
was to use them.
The engine driver said he could hardly hold out any longer at this place, but what
could he do? He was scarcely able to eat his meals for disgust. He told the soldiers
appalling stories from the camp, especially the treatment of women, which defy
description.
pp 679-681
On 6 June 1944 the Allied forces landed in Normandy. The long-awaited second front
was in being. In the east, the Red Army was poised to renew its offensive. That same
day, on the Greek island of Corfu, the Germans rounded up 1,795 Jews. All were
deported to Birkenau, where 1,500 were gassed on arrival. Also on June 6, 260 Jews
living on the island of Crete, who had been seized on May 20, were taken, together
with four hundred Greek hostages and three hundred Italian soldiers, Germany’s
former allies, a hundred miles out to sea, beyond the island of Santorini, where the
boat was scuttled. All were drowned.
On the Greek island of Zante, not far from Corfu, the Mayor Lukos Karrer and the
leading churchman, Archbishop Crysostomos, not only alerted the Jews to the danger,
but sent 195 of them to remote villages in the hills. Unfortunately, 62 Jews, all of
them elderly, who could not make the sudden journey into the rough terrain, were
seized by the Gestapo in Zante and taken to the port. “If the deportation order is
carried out,” Crysostomos declared, “I will join the Jews and share their fate.” But
when the boat arrived from Corfu to collect them, it was already so packed with Jews
that it did not stop.
pp 683-684
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‘May one cry now?’
The only children who were not
gassed at Birkenau were twins.
For more than a year, Mengele,
who personally made so many of
the selections at Birkenau, had
sought to become an expert on
the medical and genetic problems
of twins. He therefore continued
to take out all twins, both
children and adults, to a special
barracks, and for medical
experiments.
Few aspects of the history of the holocaust are as horrific as these experiments. More
than fifteen hundred Jewish twins were experimented on by Mengele in the eighteen
months after his arrival at Birkenau in May 1943. Less than two hundred survived.
One of those survivors, Vera Kriegel, recalled, forty years later, the moment when she
and her twin sister Olga reached Birkenau. Speaking to a shocked gathering in
Jerusalem she described first her arrival at the spot where Mengele practised his
selection process, sending people with a flick of his finger either in one direction, to
instant death in the crematorium, or in the other, to the labour camp. “Children were
having their heads beaten like poultry by SS men with their gun butts,” she recalled,
“and some were being thrown into a smoking pit. I was confused: I thought that this
was some sort of animal kingdom or perhaps I was already in Hell.”
Vera Kriegel and her sister Olga were five years old at that moment of horror. Their
father was among those sent to his death. The twins, and their mother, survived. They
did so because, as Vera Kriegel explained to the court, Mengele “wanted to know why
our eyes were brown while our mother's were blue.”
Vera and Olga Kriegel were forced to live in a straw-covered cage for ten days, while
Mengele performed his experiments. “They injected our eyes with liquid that burnt,”
she said. “But we tried to remain strong, because we knew that in Auschwitz the weak
went ‘up the chimney.’”
p 687
Not only Jews, but also Gypsies, were the victims of Mengele’s perversion of medical
sciences. Another survivor, Vera Alexander, recalled in the same courtroom how two
Gypsy twins, one a hunchback, had been sewn together and their veins connected by
Mengele who concentrated on blood transfusions in many experiments. “Their
wounds were infected,” she said, “and they were screaming in pain. Their parents
managed to get hold of some morphine and used it to kill them in order to end their
suffering.”
p 689
Among those murdered at Birkenau in June 1944 was the former Elder of the
Theresienstadt ghetto, Jacob Edelstein. SS Lieutenant Franz Hoessler was present
during Edelstein's last moments. An eye-witness, Yossl Roszensaft, recalled a year
later:
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Jacob was in the same barracks as I was - number 13 - on that Monday morning. It
was about nine a.m. and he was saying his morning prayers, wrapped in a prayer
shawl. Suddenly the door burst open and Hoessler strutted in, accompanied by three
SS men. He called out Jacob’s name. Jacob did not move. Hoessler screamed: “I am
waiting for you, hurry up.”
Jacob turned round very slowly, faced Hoessler and said quietly: “Of the last
moments on this earth, allotted to me by the Almighty, I am the master, not you.”
Whereupon he turned back to face the wall and finished his prayers. He then folded
his prayer shawl unhurriedly, handed it to one of the inmates and said to Hoessler: “I
am now ready.”
Hoessler stood there all the while without uttering a word, and marched out when
Edelstein was ready. Edelstein followed him and the three SS men made up the rear.
We have never seen Jacob Edelstein again.
pp 689-690
Among those deported in this June ‘resettlement’ was Mordechai Zurawski. He later
recalled how Hans Biebow told them that they would be sent to a labour camp near
Leipzig. “For you Jews who work diligently,” he added, “it will be good.”
Zurawski, who recalled Beibow using these
words, also remembered, at the railway station,
words written in Polish on the wagons; “You are
going in the carriages of death.” But no one
believed it. A few hours later, the train reached
Kolo, and from there the Jews were taken in
trucks to Chelmno, and gassed. Zurawski, sent
to the ‘Forest Commando’ to cut wood for the
crematorium, recalled how, when the deportees
reached Chelmno, they were confronted by signs
saying “To the bath house” and “To the
physician.” Then, having been given a cake of
soap and a towel, and told they were being taken
to the shower room, they were put into special vans, and driven off. After three
hundred metres, at the entrance to the crematorium, they were dead. “But in some
cases,” Zurawski recalled, “people still showed signs of life.” When that happened,
the van’s driver, a man called Belaff, “would pull out his pistol and shoot these
people.” After the bodies had been burned, the bones were ground to a fine powder in
a special “grinding apparatus.”
On one occasion, Zurawski witnessed an incident when one of the SS guards “threw a
living Jewish worker into the furnace.”
p 693
Each day saw a new development in the Jewish tragedy; on June 28 the advancing
Red Army approached Maly Trostenets camp near Minsk. Russian aircraft attacked
the camp itself. That day, the camp guards, Latvian, Ukrainian, White Russian,
Hungarian and Rumanian SS auxiliaries, were replaced by a special SS detachment,
all German, under German SS officers. This detachment locked all the surviving
prisoners, Russian civilians, Jews from the Minsk ghetto, and Viennese Jews who had
been brought from Theresienstadt, into the barracks, and then set the barracks on fire.
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All those who were able to flee from the blazing buildings were shot. About twenty
Theresienstadt Jews managed to escape the blaze and the bullets, and to hide in the
forest until the arrival of the Red Army six days later. Taken to Moscow by their
liberators, they were kept for two years in a Siberian camp on the Chinese border,
before being released, in 1946.
p 698
In Vilna, on July 2 and 3, as the city awaited the arrival of the Red Army, there were
two thousand Jews working in the Kallis factory, emaciated, but heartened by their
imminent liberation. But more than eighteen hundred of them were seized and taken
to Ponar, where they were shot. Less than two hundred workers managed to hide, and
to remain in hiding until the Red Army entered the city on July 13. In the battle for
Vilna, which had lasted five days, eight thousand German soldiers were killed.
p 699
On July 15, as the Red Army approached
one of the few surviving ghettos, that of
Siauliai, in Lithuania, four thousand
local Jews, and a further three thousand
from the nearby labour camps at
Panevezys and Joniskis, were assembled
in Siauliai and taken by train to Stutthof,
and other camps in East Prussia. A
hundred Jews who remained in Siauliai
were killed on the spot. Twelve days
later, the city was liberated.
Such was the pattern of those July days in 1944: the Red Army approaching, the
evacuation of the last thousands, the murder of the remnants. Those evacuated still
had another ten months of war and terror in front of them. The handful who were able
to hide, avoiding both evacuation and execution, welcomed their liberators and
became survivors.
p 705
July-September 1944: the last deportations
On July 24, Soviet forces entered Majdanek. War correspondents from all the Allied
armies gazed in horror at gas-chambers, crematoria, and the charred remains of
human beings. Photographs of these remains were published throughout the Allied
world. Hitler, watching with growing disdain the collapse of his armies, was roused to
an outburst of rage, fuming, as SS Brigadier Walther Hewel reported, against “the
slovenly and cowardly rabble in the Security Services who did not erase the traces” in
time.
p 711
Late in the afternoon [August 1944] Dr Mengele arrived, “already,” as Dr Nyiszli
noted, “having sent at least ten thousand men to their death,” and ordered the bodies
of the father and son boiled in water, so that the flesh could be taken from the bones.
The boiling finished, “the lab assistant very competently gathered up the bones of the
skeletons and placed them on the same work table, where, the evening before, I had
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examined the still living men.” The skeletons were then sent to the Anthropological
Museum in Berlin.
In the SS doctors at Birkenau, with their pre-war medical training and qualifications,
the transformation from good to evil was complete. The healer had become the killer.
The trained, professional saver of life, dedicated to healing, had become the selftaught, enthusiastic taker of life, dedicated to killing.
pp 720-721
By the end of August, sixty-seven
thousand Jews had been deported from
the Lodz ghetto to Birkenau. Among
them, Chaim Rumkowski, ‘King of the
Jews’ of the Lodz ghetto, their protector
and their mentor, was deported with his
family, and perished in the gas-chamber
together with more than sixty thousand
other Jews from the ghetto over which he
had exercised so much control, and, as
he believed protection.
None of the ghettos and camps in which at least some Jews had been kept alive for
their labour, whether in Riga, Vilna, Siauliai or Lodz, was able to avert the final
deportation, on the eve of their potential liberation.
p 722
However close Germany might be to defeat, the evil ‘selections’ went on. Among the
new arrivals at Birkenau in early September were 1,019 Jews sent from Holland who
reached Birkenau on September 5, of whom 549 were gassed. Dr Gisella Perl, who
watched these Dutch deportees arrive, later recalled “a group of well-dressed, whitebearded gentlemen go by, fully dressed, with hats and gloves and well-cut overcoats.
They carried fine plaid blankets and small overnight cases in their hands, like
diplomats going to some important conference.” These were “rich people,” Gisella
Perl was later told, “who had been able to hide until now, thanks to their money and
connections.” Most were gassed. “Only a very few came out of the selection alive,”
she later recalled, “dressed in rags like the rest of us.” Her account continued:
A few days later I spoke to one of these newcomers. He worked on the refuse heap
near the crematorium. In that short time, the elegant, well-groomed man, who had
looked like a diplomat, had become a dirty, lice-infected, human wreck, his spirits
broken. He was a Dutchman and he spoke German.
I saw him go over to one of the camp foreman and whisper to him under his breath,
anxiously, hurriedly. The foreman looked at him expectantly, and the new prisoner
reached under his rags and brought out a small leather pouch, the kind which usually
holds tobacco. He opened it with trembling hands and shook the contents into his
palm.
Like a million little suns the diamonds shone and sparkled in his dirty, broken-nailed
hands. Grinning broadly, the foreman nodded and held out three miserable uncooked
potatoes, and the elderly man, shaking with impatience, tore them out of his hand and
put them to his mouth, chewing, swallowing, as if every bite gave him a new lease of
life. The little pouch full of diamonds already rested in the pocket of the foreman and
he kept his hand on it, caressing the stones tenderly.
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Here, in this Stock Exchange of Hell, the value of a bag of diamonds was three
uncooked potatoes. And this value was the real one. Three potatoes had positive
value, they prolonged life, gave strength to work and to withstand beatings, and
strength meant life, even if for a short time only. The bag of diamonds itself was good
for nothing.
pp 728-729
September 1944: the Days of Awe
In September 1944, shortly before the Red Army entered Przemysl, Yosef
Buzhminsky saw, in a courtyard, “a little girl about six years old playing there.
Gestapo and SS men arrived, surrounded the courtyard. It was a Polish family
consisting of eight people. They began whipping the girl, and then they executed all
of them right there in the courtyard.” The Polish family had hidden the Jewish girl. It
was for that ‘crime’ that they, and the girl were shot.
On September 9, a group of thirty-nine Dutchmen, one American and seven
Englishmen, all of them active in the anti-Nazi underground, were brought to
Mauthausen. After spending the night inside the bunker they were driven, barefoot
and in their underclothes, to the quarry, “where” as the historian of Mauthausen has
written, ‘the 186 steps were lined on both sides by SS and Kapos swinging their
cudgels and anticipating a spectacle.” The forty-seven prisoners were “loaded with
stone slabs of up to sixty pounds in weight, and then forced to run up the steps. The
run was repeated again and again, and the blows fell faster and faster as the exhausted
prisoners stumbled on the uneven steps.” One of the prisoners was a British Jew,
Marcus Bloom, who had operated a clandestine radio in Nazi-occupied Europe. He,
the historian noted, “was the first to fall.”
Bloom was shot in the head at point-blank range.
pp 732-733
Protectors and persecutors
On October 16 the Germans returned to
Budapest. The Nyilas, a Fascist group
whose members had been arrested by
Horthy in July, were released and armed.
They at once began to drag Jews from
their houses and made them walk the
streets, as Arie Breslauer recalled, “with
their hands above their heads.” Then, for
ten days, Jews were forbidden to leave
their houses. Women in labour could
receive no help. The dead could not be
buried. No food could be bought and no
doctor summoned to attend the sick. At
the same time, Nyilas gangs seized a
large number of Jewish forced labourers
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in the Obuda suburb, drove them across the Margit and Chain bridges linking Obuda
with Pest, and, while they were still on the bridge shot them and threw their bodies
into the waters of the Danube.
On October 17, Adolf Eichmann returned to Budapest. He at once demanded fifty
thousand able-bodied Jews to be marched on foot to Germany, to serve as forced
labourers there. All the remaining Jews of Budapest, he wanted to be assembled in
ghetto-like camps near the capital. “You see,” Eichmann told the Hungarian Jewish
leader, Rudolf Kastner, “I am back again. You forgot Hungary is still in the shadow of
the Reich. My arms are long enough and I can reach the Jews of Budapest as well.”
The Jews of Budapest, Eichmann added, “will be driven out on foot this time.”
These deportations began on October 20. Even as Soviet troops approached Budapest
from the south-east, Jews from Budapest were marching westward, away from the
advancing Soviet forces, to dig anti-tank trenches. Beginning on October 22, twentyfive thousand men and boys and ten thousand women and girls were taken, in four
days, for this task. As the Red Army drew even closer, thousands of the marchers
were shot or died.
pp 751-752
There now began the systematic destruction of the evidence. Ten days before the
gassings of October 30, two small taxis and a prison car had brought a mass of
documents to Crematorium III. These were the files about individual prisoners, death
certificates, and charge sheets. All were burned. The destruction of evidence went in
parallel with the last weeks of human killing.
p 757
By the end of October 1944 the Red Army had driven the Germans from eastern
Poland and from most of Hungary. In the recently liberated areas, the surviving Jews
emerged from their hiding places and returned to their homes. The thirteen-year-old
Icchak Soneson had returned with his parents and his younger sister to the village of
Ejszyszki. In 1941, Ejszyszki had been the home of two thousand Jews. Only thirty
had survived the massacres of the war. “We kept together,” Soneson later recalled,
“we took a few flats in neighbouring houses. We did our best to rebuild our lives.”
But on October 20 disaster struck. Polish Home Army men, known as ‘White Poles’
attacked the Jewish houses. Soneson’s mother and baby brother were killed, as well as
two Soviet soldiers.
p 759
In another labour camp that winter, at Neumark, were several thousand women,
likewise brought from Bikenau. Hundreds of them, too weak to work, were put in a
special tent, and told that they were to be deported to Stutthof. No such deportation
was in prospect. All were later shot at Neumark. While being kept in the ‘Stutthofers’
tent, as it was called, their suffering became unendurable. Reska Weiss, who saw
them, later recalled:
No one as allowed into the Stutthofers tent. If anyone was caught visiting a mother or
a sister, she was never allowed to leave the tent again. The Stutthofers were seldom
given food, and on the rare occasions when it was supplied, it was placed on the
ground in the dark in front of the tent. Then the strongest of them fetched it and
distributed it.
Entering the tent from the blinding snow-whiteness, I could hardly distinguish
anything in the semi-darkness, least of all the women lying on the ground. The stench
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was overpowering despite the airy tent. After a while my eyes became accustomed to
the light, and I was completely overcome by what I saw.
I screamed in horror and shut my eyes to the sight. My knees trembled, my head
began to swim, and I grasped the central tent prop for support. It was hard to believe
the women on the ground were still human beings. Their rigid bodies were skeletons,
their eyes were glazed from long starvation. . . .
For two months the Stutthofers had lain on the ground, stark naked. The meagre
bundles of straw on which they lay were putrid from their urine and excreta. Their
frozen limbs were fetid and covered with wounds and bites to the points of bleeding,
and countless lice nested in the pus. Their hair was very short indeed, but the armies
of lice found a home in it. No stretch of the imagination, no power of the written
word, can convey the horrors of that tent. And yet . . . they were alive . . . they were
hungry and they tore at their skeletal bodies with emaciated hands covered in pus and
dirt. They were beyond help. The SS guards denied them the mercy of shooting them
all at once. Only three or four were called out daily to be shot.
For days I couldn't swallow even a crumb of bread. The horror I lived through
watching this agony will remain with me to the end of my days. Later I saw thousands
of my fellow prisoners die from rifle shots, but even that could not compare with the
terrible and unspeakable ordeal of the Stutthofers.
pp 764-765
The death marches
Those Jews who returned to what had once been the Warsaw ghetto saw at first
glance the meaning of the Holocaust. Whereas the Poles had already begun the slow
and painful process of rebuilding their shattered city, and re-establishing their
interrupted lives and careers, the Jews could not do so. Firstly there were far too few
survivors. Secondly, the former Jewish buildings had been levelled to the ground.
Polish Warsaw as able to return to life as the capital of modern Poland. Jewish
Warsaw was destroyed forever, and with it the “Jewish Nation in Poland” which had
been so vibrant feature of the pre-war Polish state.
The same was true of every city or town in what had once been German-occupied
Poland. The Poles and the Jews both mourned their dead: but only the Poles had the
numbers and the resources left to repopulate their cities. Unlike the Jews, many nonJews had never even had to leave their homes. Whereas every non-Jewish family had
suffered death and privation, few had been destroyed in their entirety. For the Jews,
the vast majority of their families had been destroyed root and branch, so that for most
families not a single individual remained alive, to return to claim a stake in the new
world.
p 769
None of those who survived the ‘death marches’ of January 1945 can forget the
horror. “On the death march from Auschwitz,” one survivor later recalled, “German
women heard we were prisoners, and threw boiled potatoes. Those who picked up the
potatoes died with a bullet - and a hot potato in their mouths.”
Dr Aharon Beilin later recalled how, on the march from Birkenau to Kamienna
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Gora, “We started counting the shots. It
was a long column - five thousand
people. We know every shot meant a
human life. Sometimes the count reached
five hundred, in a single day. And the
longer we marched, the more the number
of shots increased. There was no
strength, no food.” One night, the four
thousand survivors were locked in a
concrete bunker, an air raid shelter. “We
felt that we had no air, that there as no
air in this bunker, and those groups that
were far from the door felt it much more
than we did, and the screams, the tragic scenes, began, “Air, air!”. . . .”
In the morning, a thousand corpses were found in the bunker. “It was death by
suffocation,” Beilin recalled, “horrible positions, naked on their knees and with their
mouths to the concrete floor. That's where the last pockets of air were. From the pores
of the concrete, they got the last bit of air.”
pp 774-775
On January 29 the German Catholic, Oscar Schindler, who had earlier rescued several
hundred Jews from Plaszow camp, was told of a locked goods wagon at the station
nearest to his armament factory at Brunnlitz. The wagon was marked “Property of the
SS,” and had been travelling on the railways for ten days, covered in ice. Inside were
more than a hundred Jews, starving and freezing: Jews from Birkenau who had been
at the labour camp at Golleschau, Jews who had once lived in Poland,
Czechoslovakia, France, Holland and Hungary.
Schindler had no authority to take the wagon. But he asked a railway official to show
him the bill of loading, and when the official was momentarily distracted, wrote on it:
“Final destination, Brunnlitz.” Schindler then pointed out to the official that the
wagon was intended for his factory. Schindler ordered the railway authorities to
transfer the wagon to his factory siding. There he broke open the locks. Sixteen of the
Jews had frozen to death. The survivors, not one of whom weighed more than thirtyfive kilogrammes, he fed and guarded. Schindler was helped by his wife Emilia, who
provided beds on which they could be nursed back to life. “She took care of these
Golleschau Jews,” Moshe Bejski later recalled. “She prepared food for them every
day.”
In all, between 1943 and 1945, Schindler had saved more than fifteen hundred Jews
by employing them in his factory, and treating them humanely. He died, in Germany,
in October 1974. At his funeral in the Latin cemetery in Jerusalem, on the slopes of
Mount Zion, more than four hundred of the Jews whom he had saved paid him their
last respects.
p 777
The ‘tainted luck’ of survival
A thousand Jewish women, many of them survivors of Auschwitz, had been marched
westward and south, away from the advancing Soviet forces. As with so many of the
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death marches, they passed through many German towns and villages: on February 28
they were at Bautzen. One of those on the march, Gisela Teumann, later recalled how,
“We passed through some German town. We asked for food. At first they thought we
were German refugees. The SS man who accompanied us shouted: “Don't give them
anything to eat, it’s Jews they are.” And so I got no food. German children began to
throw stones at us.”
p 784
On April 10, Adolf Eichmann made his last visit to Theresienstadt. There, he was
heard to say: “I shall gladly jump into the pit, knowing that in the same pit there are
five million enemies of the state.” Three days later, one of the death marches, mostly
of Auschwitz survivors, reached the area of Belsen. One of the survivors, Menachem
Weinryb, later recalled:
One night we stopped near the town of Gardelegen. We lay down in a field and
several Germans went to consult about what they should do. They returned with a lot
of young people from the Hitler Youth and with members of the police force from the
town.
They chased us all into a large barn. Since we were five to six thousand people, the
wall of the barn collapsed from the pressure of the mass of people, and many of us
fled. The Germans poured out petrol and set the barn on fire. Several thousand people
were burned alive.
Those of us who had managed to escape lay down in the nearby wood and heard the
heart-rending screams of the victims. This as on April 13. . . .
On April 14, United States troops reached Gardelegen itself. There, in yet another
camp established for the death marchers, they found, in a huge open pit, the still
burning logs on which the bodies of the dead had been cremated.
pp 792-793
“Men and women, clad in rags,”
Colonel Gerald Draper has
recalled, “and barely able to
move from starvation and typhus,
lay in their straw bunks in every
state of filth and degradation. The
dead and dying could not be
distinguished.” Men and women
“collapsed as they walked and
fell dead.” In order to cope with
what they found in “verminous
and stinking barracks,” Draper
added, the British army doctors
“marked a red cross on the
foreheads of those they thought had a chance of surviving.”
p 794
Photographs, films and artcles about Belsen circulated widely in Britain by the end of
April, making so great an impact that the word ‘Belsen’ was to become synonymous
with ‘inhumanity.’ For these were not reports of discoveries by the Red Army in the
distant eastern regions of the Rich, but of horrors as seen by men from London and
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Manchester, from the Midlands and the north of England, battle-weary soldiers
familiar enough with the horrors of war by April 1945, but shocked as they never
thought they could be by the sights that confronted them. “There had been no food nor
water for five days preceding the British entry,” a British army review reported.
“Evidence of cannibalism was
found. The inmates had lost all self-respect, were degraded morally to the level of
beasts. Their clothes were in rags, teeming with lice, and both inside and outside the
huts was an almost continuous carpet of dead bodies, human excreta, rags and filth.”
pp 794-795
On the same day that British troops entered Belsen, American troops entered yet
another camp at Nordhausen, where hundreds of slave labourers were found, “in
conditions,” as the United States Signal Corps recorded, “almost unrecognizable as
human. All were little more than skeletons: the dead lay beside the sick and dying in
the same beds: filth and human excrement covered the floors. No attempt had been
made to alleviate the disease and gangrene that had spread unchecked among the
prisoners.”
p 796
In Berlin, on April 29, Adolf Hitler dictated his political testament. The Second World
War, he wrote, had been “provoked exclusively” by those international statesmen
“who were either of Jewish origin or worked for Jewish interests.” The Jews were
“the real guilty party in this murderous struggle” and would be “saddled” with the
responsibility of it. Hitler added:
I left no one in doubt that this time not only would millions of European Aryan races
starve, not only would millions of grown men meet their death, and not only would
hundreds of thousands of women and children be burned and bombed to death in
cities, but this time the real culprits would have to pay for their guilt even though by
more humane means than war.
The “more humane means” had been the gas-chambers.
He had decided, Hitler declared, to die in Berlin so as not to “fall into the hands of the
enemy, who requires a new spectacle, presented by the Jews, to divert their hysterical
masses.”
On April 30 Hitler committed suicide in his bunker in Berlin.
pp 803-804
Epilogue ‘I will tell the world’
The war was over; the systematic murder of six million Jews was also at an end. But
its reverberations continue to this day. Too many scars had been inflicted, too much
blood had been spilled, for 8 May 1945 to mark the end of the story, or the end of the
tragedy for the two hundred thousand survivors of the ghettos, camps and death
marches.
p 811
On May 20, Henry Slamovich, one of the Jews from Plaszow who had been saved by
Oscar Schindler, returned with about twenty-five other young Jews, all of them
survivors, to his home town of Dzialoszyce. “We thought to ourselves,” he later
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recalled, “we had survived. We are alive, we are going to enjoy freedom.” Even
though his own home was now lived in by non-Jews, Slamovich was determined
somehow to rebuild his life in his own town. But within a week, four of the twentyfive Jews who had returned were murdered by Polish anti-Semites. The rest of the
young Jews realized they would have to leave. “It was sad, very sad,” Slamovich
recalled, thirty-five years later, in his home in San Francisco.
p 812
The survivors did not expect to be understood. But they did expect to be allowed to
live in peace. It was not to be: on August 20 anti-Jewish riots broke out in Cracow,
followed by further riots in Sosnowiec on October 25 and in Lublin on November 19.
Within seven months of the end of the war in Europe, and after a year in which no
German soldier was on Polish soil, 350 Jews had been murdered in Poland.
Thousands more faced danger when they returned to their home towns and villages.
p 816
The climax of these post-war killings came on 4 July 1946. Three days earlier, an
eight-year-old Polish boy from Kielce, Henryk Blaszczyk, disappeared from his
home. Two days later he returned, claiming that he had been kept in a cellar by two
Jews who had wanted to kill him, and that only a miracle had enabled him to escape.
In fact, he had been to the home of a family friend in a nearby village. The friend had
taught him what to say after his return.
On July 4 a crowd of Poles, aroused by rumours of Jews abducting Christian children
for ritual purposes, attacked the building of the Jewish Committee in Kielce. Almost
all the Jews who were inside the building, including the Chairman of the Committee,
Dr Seweryn Kahane, were shot, stoned to death, or killed with axes and blunt
instruments. Elsewhere in Kielce, Jews were murdered in their homes, or dragged into
the streets and killed by the mob.
Forty-two Jews were killed in Kielce that day. . . .
Following the Kielce ‘pogrom,’ one hundred thousand Polish Jews, more than half
the survivors, fled from Poland, seeking new homes in Palestine, Western Europe,
Britain and the United States, Latin America and Australia.
p 819
Between 1939 and 1945 the Germans killed many millions of non-Jewish civilians in
Germany itself, and in every occupied country, often in massive reprisal actions or
after prolonged torture. The shooting down in cold blood of unarmed, defenceless
Greeks, Poles, Yugoslavs, Czechs, Russians, and men, women and children of a
dozen other nationalities, all of them civilians who had taken no part in military
action, was a feature of Nazi rule throughout Europe. Among those murdered were as
many as a quarter of a million Gypsies, tens of thousands of homosexuals, and tens of
thousands of ‘mental-defectives.’ Also murdered, often after the cruelties of tortures,
were several million Soviet prisoners-of-war, shot or starved to death long after they
had been captured and disarmed.
As well as the six million Jews who were murdered, more than ten million other noncombatants were killed by the Nazis. Under the Nazi scheme, Poles, Czechs, Serbs
and Russians were to become subject peoples; slaves, workers of the New Order. The
Jews were to disappear altogether. It was the Jews alone who were marked out to be
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destroyed in their entirety: every Jewish man, woman and child, so that there would
be no future Jewish life in Europe. Against the eight million Jews who lived in Europe
in 1939, the Nazi bureaucracy assembled all the concerted skills and mechanics of a
modern state: the police, the railways, the civil service, the industrial power of the
Reich; poison gas, soldiers, mercenaries, criminals, machine guns, artillery; and over
all, a massive apparatus of deception.
p 824
The stories told in these pages can convey only a fragment of the Jewish suffering,
and courage, of those terrible years. With the Allied victory in 1945, the Holocaust
became history, increasingly remote, forgotten; a chapter, reduced to a page,
shortened to a paragraph, relegated to a footnote. Yet it must still be remembered in
each generation for what it was: an unprecedented explosion of evil over good. p 826
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